When Panethnic Primes Get Trumped: Unpacking Latinx Voter Preferences in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election 66.4
Roberto F. Carlos, Hajer Al-Faham, Michael Jones-Correa
📚 Political Behavior
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Throughout his presidency, Trump employed exclusionary rhetoric and implemented policies that targeted Latinxs. Based on prior research on the political effects of co-ethnic group-based attacks, many expected Latinxs to close ranks and mobilize against Trump in 2020. Yet a larger percentage of Latinx voters supported Trump in 2020 than in 2016. Drawing on a representative survey of Latinxs, we examine the characteristics of the Latinx electorate that predicted support for Trump in 2020. Additionally, using a survey experiment fielded before the 2020 election, we find that neither Trump’s exclusionary rhetoric nor his COVID-19 policies harming Latinx communities caused Latinx Trump supporters to defect. Instead, only those already predisposed to support Democrats, but ambivalent about Biden, were moved to punish Trump when informed of his COVID-19 policies negatively affecting their co-ethnics. Our results suggest that the relationship between co-ethnic group-based attacks and Latinx political behavior may be weakening over time.
Background Matters, but Not Whether Parents Are Immigrants: Outcomes of Children Born in Denmark 60.9
Mathias FjĂŠllegaard Jensen, Alan Manning
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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In Europe, the children of migrants often have worse economic outcomes than those with local-born parents. This paper shows that children born in Denmark with immigrant parents (first-generation locals) have lower earnings, higher unemployment, less education, more welfare transfers, and more criminal convictions than children with local-born parents. However, when we condition on parental socioeconomic characteristics, first-generation locals generally perform as well or slightly better than the children of locals. While children of immigrants are more likely to come from deprived backgrounds, they do not experience substantially different outcomes conditional on parental background. (JEL I38, J13, J15, J31, J82)
Reframing perceptions of immigrants’ desirability in a time of labour shortages: the case of racialised immigrant workers in Denmark 60.6
Dorothea Pozzato
✹ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
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Young migrants, “integration” and the local: critical reflections from European stakeholders 60.0
Izabela Grabowska, Christina Hansen, Agata Jastrzebowska, Jacob Lind, Ioana Manafi, Birte Nienaber, Ryan Powell, Thea Shahrokh
✹ Comparative Migration Studies
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This article examines the complexities of integrating young adult migrants from non-EU countries into European contexts, advocating for a shift toward inclusive, locally informed, and reciprocal integration processes. It critiques state-centric, assimilationist frameworks that emphasize an imagined national identity and Western norms of youth transitions, neglecting local nuances and diverse migrant experiences. Through findings from a European Delphi study engaging 114 stakeholders from seven European countries, including migrant youth organisations, also represented by stakeholders with a migration background, the study highlights the need for a dynamic, process-oriented approach to integration. This approach prioritizes mutual adjustments between migrants and host communities, emphasizing flexibility, responsiveness, and local relevance. The study underscores the role of local actors and contexts in shaping integration policies, contrasting inclusivity at the local level with exclusionary national frameworks. Stakeholders emphasized the harmful impact of state-imposed policies and the importance of youth groups and migrant organizations as active contributors to policy development. The research proposes tailored solutions to address vulnerabilities and calls for long-term, multi-level governance that values the lived experiences of young migrants. Utilizing a two-stage Delphi methodology, the study facilitated anonymous stakeholder dialogue across seven European countries, yielding consensus on key integration challenges and innovative policy recommendations. By integrating diverse perspectives and recognizing young migrants as co-creators of their futures, this article advances debates on migration and integration, advocating for policies that are equitable, inclusive, and grounded in local realities.
Ethnolinguistic affiliation and migration: evidence from multigenerational population registers 59.6
Rosa Weber, Jan Saarela
📚 European Societies
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The empirical base for understanding how cultural and linguistic proximity shape international migration remains limited. Here, we assess how individuals’ migration and return migration behavior differs by own and parental ethnolinguistic affiliation, using Finnish longitudinal population register data that cover the years 1987–2020 (N=1,822,484). Information on two generations allows us to distinguish between Finnish-born individuals with uniform and mixed backgrounds. Finnish and Swedish speakers with mixed backgrounds are particularly informative, because they have similar observable characteristics but differ in mother tongue and thus often attend distinct school systems (either the Finnish-speaking or the Swedish-speaking school system). Results from piecewise constant exponential models reveal a clear ethnolinguistic gradient in the likelihood of migrating, which is magnified for migration to linguistically and/or culturally proximate countries. Swedish speakers with Swedish-speaking parents are the most likely to migrate to Sweden and the other Nordic countries, followed by those with mixed backgrounds. Finnish speakers with Finnish-speaking parents are the least likely to migrate. Patterns for return migration provide the mirror image. The findings remain largely consistent when we control for socioeconomic characteristics and the ethnolinguistic composition of the municipality. These results underscore the important role of ethnolinguistic affiliation in migration behavior.
Social Position and Migrant Networks in International Migration from Africa to Europe 57.9
Sorana Toma, Mao-Mei Liu
✹ International Migration Review
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Ample prior research shows that social capital is contingent on a person's position in society and is, consequently, a significant factor in perpetuating and amplifying social inequalities. In contrast, migration scholarship is relatively quiet about how social position may stratify the role of migrant networks, and instead conceptualizes migrant networks as broadening access to migration. This paper integrates theoretical insights from these two lines of research to offer a novel contribution on the interplay between social stratification and migrant networks. We examine three pathways—network access, network mobilization, and network returns—through which social position may shape migrant networks and, as such, reinforce inequalities in migration. To do so, we employ retrospective data from the multi-sited Migration between Africa and Europe survey that allows us to account for the dynamic nature of migrant networks and to distinguish among these pathways. Our study highlights significant stratification in access, mobilization, and returns to migrant networks among individuals in different social positions, operationalized as educational attainment. In a context of positive educational selectivity such as sub-Saharan African migration to Europe, access to migrant networks increases substantially with higher social position. And while lower-educated individuals rely more financially on migrant networks, which offer them larger relative gains, these networks ultimately exacerbate initial advantages and amplify social inequalities in migration opportunities.
Tax Incentives for Migrants with Mid-level Earnings: Evidence from the Netherlands † 57.5
Lisa Marie Timm, Massimo Giuliodori, Paul Muller
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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We examine how income taxes affect international mobility and wages. We study a Dutch preferential tax scheme for migrants, which introduced an income threshold for eligibility in 2012. The threshold is low relative to similar schemes in other countries, thereby offering eligibility to migrants with mid-level earnings. We find migration more than doubles closely above the income threshold, while migration below the threshold remains unchanged. These effects appear to be driven by additional migration, while wage bargaining responses are limited. We estimate a migration elasticity ranging from 1.6 to 2.7, somewhat higher than most studies on high-income migrants have found. (JEL H24, H31, J15, J31, J82)
States, cities, and border control: Do sub‐state collectives have a right to protect vulnerable people on the move? 57.4
Kim Angell
📚 American Journal of Political Science
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It is beyond doubt that states everywhere practice discretionary border control. However, in normative political theory, there is vigorous debate about the justifiability of this practice. Some theorists appeal to border crossers’ interest in free movement, envisioning an open borders utopia, while others emphasize the value of collective self‐determination, defending strong border control rights for states. Both perspectives focus on two primary interest‐holders: state collectives and individual border crossers. This analysis offers a novel perspective by arguing that cities—and sub‐state collectives in general—may also have significant interests in immigration policy. Through empirical examples like Europe's “Solidarity Cities” and North American sanctuary cities, the paper argues that cities often possess self‐determination–based rights to protect an additional quota of vulnerable border crossers, beyond those their state protects. This conclusion is surprising because appeals to self‐determination typically defend a state's right to limit migration. Yet, it is one that proponents of the self‐determination view have reason to accept.
Ubuntu Tensions in Migrant Remittance Behavior: The Case of African Migrants’ Lived Experiences 56.7
Abiodun Samuel Adegbile, Juliana Siwale, Ugbede Umoru, Olu Aluko
✹ International Migration Review
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This study, based on in-depth interviews with 50 African migrants living in the United Kingdom, argues for a more nuanced approach to studying their remittance behavior. Drawing from the tension-centered approach, we posit that African migrants derived their remittance behavior in tensional ways based on the philosophy of Ubuntu, which is both enabling and constraining, stemming from the social context of the home and host countries. This occurs through ongoing negotiation with allegiance to Ubuntu from their home African country, their acculturation to the host country, and migrants scaling back from remitting due to ongoing experiences. In addition to examining migrant remittance behavior as a dynamic and contested negotiation, the sociocultural implications of such remittance behavior patterns are identified. We conclude by discussing some implications for future research on remittance behavior. Our research thus contributes to a more fine-grained understanding of the remittance behavior of African migrants.
Unpacking the role of in‐group bias in US public opinion on human rights violations 56.4
Rebecca Cordell
📚 American Journal of Political Science
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Which actor identities and social and political cleavages drive public opinion on human rights violations? While in‐group bias is known to influence public responses to government abuses, the relative impact of different identity characteristics has not been directly tested. Building on social identity theory and moral typecasting theory, I use a conjoint survey experiment in the United States of 3,200 respondents to examine the causal effects of in‐group bias across multiple actor identities (perpetrator, target, and elite cue giver) and social and political divides (partisanship, race, religion, and citizenship). Party loyalty to the perpetrator dominates other group identities; simply changing the perpetrator's political identity can be an important determinant for whether respondents oppose violations. Surprisingly, the target's race, religion, and citizenship has mixed impact, and partisan cues have little effect. These findings highlight when group loyalty outweighs human rights concerns and where public demand for government accountability may be reduced.
How Do They Stereotype Us? An Analysis of the Perceived Stereotypes of Chinese in Spain and Its Impact on Intergroup Relations 55.7
Wang Zigang, Liang Fangjun, Zhou Feng, Peng Chuwen
✹ International Migration
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As the largest Asian immigrant group in Spain, the Chinese community has emerged as an essential part of the nation's social fabric. Despite the flourishing research on stereotypes about the Chinese in Spanish society, the actual perceived stereotypes of the latter and their influence on intergroup relations have not been adequately addressed. This paper provides insights from the perspective of Chinese in Spain, utilising 258 questionnaires to collect and analyse the common and representative stereotypes perceived by this diaspora. Through quantitative analysis, the paper evaluates the impact of these perceived stereotypes on the Chinese community's favorability towards Spaniards, their contact experiences, and their willingness to forge closer intergroup ties. The research uncovers a diverse spectrum of stereotypes perceived by the Chinese in Spain, which are organised into five distinct dimensions. The study finds that positive stereotype perceptions significantly enhance the Chinese community's favorability towards Spaniards, improve intergroup contact experiences, and intensify their aspiration to establish intimate relationships. However, when it comes to negative perceived stereotypes, the Chinese community demonstrates a notable level of understanding and tolerance, which only negatively impacts their intergroup contact experiences with Spaniards. This finding reveales the complexity of the perceived stereotypes by Chinese in Spain and their role in dynamic intergroup relationships, providing insights for further understanding this ethnic group and promoting their social integration.
Income Aspirations and Migration: Evidence From Rural Tajikistan 55.0
Jeffrey R. Bloem, Isabel Lambrecht, Kamiljon Akromov
✹ International Migration Review
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In places with limited employment opportunities, households aspiring to increase their income are mainly left with two options: either (a) invest locally in their farm or non-farm enterprises, or (b) earn income elsewhere via migration. With survey data from 1,705 respondents from rural Tajikistan, we analyze the relationship between income aspirations and household investment strategies, and we contrast this to the relationship between income aspirations and international migration. We find evidence of a strong link between the income aspirations gap and international migration, but, strikingly, we do not observe any association between the income aspirations gap and local investment in farm or non-farm assets. These results suggest that households do not view local investment as a viable strategy for increasing income. Exploring heterogeneity, we find that these results can vary by household poverty status and household land endowments, but not by the respondent's gender. Given the prominence of migration in the study area, this also suggests that remittances commonly serve different purposes than farm or non-farm investments — such as supporting households in their day-to-day expenditures or funding major ritual events.
Cueing Without Parties: Experimental Evidence from Peru 54.9
NicolĂĄs de la Cerda
📚 Political Behavior
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Citizens infer policy information from partisan cues, yet their utility varies cross-nationally. In weakly institutionalized democracies with short-lived political parties and volatile party systems, partisan cues are likely of little heuristic value. I argue that in these contexts, citizens leverage alternative political markers, such as ideological or political movement-related categories, to make sense of the political arena. I test this argument in Peru, a country with an extremely volatile and distrusted party system. Using a survey experiment, I show that political cues significantly influence policy preferences even in the absence of clear and strong partisan brands. Further analysis using causal forest reveals that movement-related political identities are the primary moderators of cueing effects, outweighing traditional factors such as partisanship or ideology. Notably, while non-partisan cues influence attitude formation, only outgroup cues effectively shape preferences. I theorize that this asymmetry could potentially stem from two distinct features of the Peruvian political landscape: deep mistrust in political parties and patterns of affective polarization marked by stronger outgroup prejudice than ingroup favoritism. Overall, this study underscores the importance of alternative forms of political identification in weakly institutionalized party systems, extending existing theories of public opinion formation to diverse democratic settings.
Moral Reframing and Transgender Athlete Bans: In-groups, Out-groups, and a Future Research Agenda 54.6
Kimberly Martin, Elizabeth Rahilly
📚 PS: Political Science & Politics
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Scholars have long touted the power of moral convictions in shaping political attitudes. Moral reframing involves designing messages that align with an opponent’s moral convictions with the goal of increasing their willingness to adopt that position. Using lessons from the literature on political psychology, we examine the rhetoric used by legislators supporting and opposing transgender athlete bans in US states to determine how moral reframing was used. We find that the moral convictions of both sides, coupled with their emphasis on in-groups and out-groups, lead legislators to interpret the fundamental principles of the bills differently. This dynamic renders it challenging to reframe moral arguments in a manner that might sway opponents. Additional research is needed to study the efficacy of moral reframing in legislative debates on transgender-related policies.
Voters rally around the incumbent in the aftermath of terrorist attacks: evidence from multiple unexpected events during surveys 54.6
Albert Falcó-Gimeno, Jordi Muñoz, Roberto Pannico
📚 Political Science Research and Methods
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Research on the political consequences of terrorism often finds a rally around the flag effect: terrorist attacks, as other types of threats, tend to produce spikes in popularity and support for the incumbent, as citizens turn to those in power seeking protection. Most research, however, is based on single case studies that analyze very salient attacks from international terrorist organizations. Even if these studies are well identified, the question of generalizability remains, as the studied attacks are often very idiosyncratic. In this paper, we explore the rally around the flag effect in an arguably difficult context: a sustained terrorist campaign held by domestic terrorist groups in a parliamentary democracy (Spain). To overcome the limitations of the single-attack studies, we use a multiple unexpected event approach: we developed a systematic process of matching the occurrence of terror attacks during the fieldwork of official public opinion surveys in Spain, through which we identified 142 valid attack-survey pairs. We find that in the attacked region support for the incumbent increases, on average, around 4 percentage points right after an attack, while support for the opposition decreases in a similar amount. These effects seem to occur mostly for the conservative incumbent and are especially relevant for the attacks that target civilians. We use a survey experiment to provide additional evidence in support for our interpretation of the findings.
Motivated Reasoning and Partisanship: Explaining the Political Polarization Over Science 54.2
Rodrigo Alonso Reyes Cordova, peter achterberg
đŸ”„ Preprint
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This study examines the political polarization of public trust in science across Europe, focusing on the roles of motivated reasoning and political partisanship. We distinguish between impact science, which often entails regulatory constraints on industrial activity, and production science, which supports technological and economic development. While prior research has largely centered on the U.S., European data reveal similar ideological patterns: left-leaning individuals exhibit greater trust in science overall, and particularly in impact science, while right-leaning individuals show greater trust in production science. These findings suggest that the politicization of science is domain-specific. We find evidence for both motivated reasoning and partisanship as drivers of science polarization. Education amplifies ideological differences in trust toward impact science, consistent with motivated reasoning, while closeness to a particular political party amplifies ideological differences in trust toward science in general and impact science, highlighting the role of partisanship. Exploratory path analysis indicates that partisanship exerts a greater influence than education. Our findings underscore that polarization is most pronounced in scientific disciplines and claims that challenge industrial interests and align with social welfare goals, and that partisanship plays a central role in shaping public trust in this scientific domain.
Differential Effects of Completing College in Reducing COVID-19 Job Loss by Race and Skin Color 54.2
Betsy Alafoginis, Nanum Jeon, Jennie E. Brand
đŸ”„ Preprint
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The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented labor market disruptions, disproportionately affecting low-wage workers and exacerbating existing social and racial inequalities (Coats et al. 2022; Cortes and Forsythe 2023; Fazzari and Needler 2021; Parker, Minkin, and Bennett 2020; SĂĄenz and Sparks 2020). While large-scale crises, including pandemics, have sometimes disrupted entrenched economic hierarchies and reduced inequality by shaking the foundations of power and privilege (Scheidel 2017), the COVID-19 crisis stands in contrast to this pattern, with inequality patterns more in line with recent economic recessions (Couch and Fairlie 2010; Couch, R. Fairlie, and Xu 2018; Couch, R. W. Fairlie, and Xu 2020; Hoynes 1999). Workers in low-wage sectors, such as hospitality, retail, and other service industries, who are disproportionately from racial minority groups and less likely to hold a college degree, faced high levels of job insecurity. In contrast, workers in high-skilled occupations, particularly those able to work remotely, were better positioned to weather the economic storm, highlighting the role of educational attainment as a key factor in mitigating labor market disruptions (Acemoglu 2002; Angelucci, Manuela, Marco Angrisani, Daniel M Bennett, Arie Kapteyn, and Simone G Schaner. 2020; Grusky et al. 2021; Montenovo et al. 2022). The sudden economic downturn and unprecedented labor market conditions triggered by COVID- 19 provide a unique backdrop to reassess the utility of college degrees under crisis conditions and explore whether the effects of having college degrees vary across different subsets of workers.
Decolonizing migration studies 54.1
Beatriz Padilla
✹ Comparative Migration Studies
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Misperception and Accountability in Polarized Societies 54.0
Shuhei Kitamura, Ryo Takahashi, Katsunori Yamada
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Elections are a primary mechanism through which citizens can hold politicians accountable for misconduct. However, whether voters actually punish corruption at the ballot box remains an open question, as electoral decisions often involve strategic considerations, including beliefs about how others think and behave. To better understand how such strategic considerations operate in this context, we conducted a pre-registered information intervention during a major political corruption scandal in Japan. The treatment provided information about the prevailing social norm—specifically, the perceived social intolerance of the scandal. The treatment increased turnout and support for a challenger, particularly among swing voters who initially believed that others were intolerant of corruption. Among party loyalists with more lenient prior beliefs, the same information backfired, increasing support for the incumbent. The turnout effect among swing voters was sizable—approximately six percentage points—comparable in magnitude to benchmark mobilization interventions involving personalized contact or social pressure. To account for these patterns, we develop a simple model that incorporates mechanisms—notably *moral reinforcement* and *identity reinforcement*—that generate predictions consistent with the observed heterogeneity in responses. By highlighting how perceptions of prevailing norms shape voter behavior in the presence of strategic considerations, this study contributes to a broader understanding of how democratic institutions can remain resilient in the face of political misconduct.
Does the growth of religious minorities transform electoral politics? Evidence from the evangelical boom in Brazil 53.7
Victor AraĂșjo
📚 Political Science Research and Methods
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Christian evangelicals now represent a significant share of the global population. Notably, they are expected to soon outnumber Roman Catholics in several low- and middle-income countries. This paper examines whether such episodes of religious minority growth can reshape electoral politics. To address this, I combine novel data spanning over two decades (1994–2018) of Christian evangelicals’ expansion across Brazilian municipalities with indicators of structural changes in electoral politics: voter turnout, competition, polarization, and conservatism. Regression models with unit and year-fixed effects reveal no impact of the evangelical boom on electoral competition and polarization, suggestive evidence of increasing conservatism in recent years, and a clear and robust negative effect on turnout. Regression discontinuity design estimates, leveraging an exogenous and discontinuous growth of Christian evangelicals in Brazil’s rural areas, support these findings. The results suggest that the rise of religious minorities may drive gradual transformations in electoral politics.
Tackling online disinformation at the institutional and societal level 53.3
Elizaveta Gaufman, Martijn Schoonvelde, REGROUP project
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Disinformation has become an increasing concern for European policymakers and the broader public, raising pressing questions about safeguarding political discourse and institutional trust in an evolving digital landscape. This focus paper begins by mapping the current landscape of disinformation policies within the European Union, including public and private regulatory approaches. While significant efforts have been made— particularly in targeting foreign information manipulation—we argue that existing policy frameworks overlook important aspects of how disinformation works. Above all, there is a lack of attention to the issue of credibility: how individuals determine whether information is trustworthy and what role identity cues play in their assessments. To address this gap, we conducted a survey experiment to understand how young people evaluate the credibility of online content. The experiment involved 152 university students at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Respondents were sorted into different groups based on their self-identified gender and country of origin at the beginning of the survey. They were then asked to assess the credibility of a series of social media posts covering a range of topics. Finally, respondents were invited to reflect in writing on the reasons behind their evaluations, allowing us to compare quantitative trust ratings with qualitative reasoning. Our findings confirm that content quality remains the strongest predictor of perceived credibility. However, they also reveal that subtle identity cues—such as a shared gender or national background between the respondent and the post’s author—exert a small but consistent influence on trust evaluations. These effects often occur below the level of conscious awareness, suggesting that social proximity and identity alignment can shape how people perceive truth, even when they believe they are evaluating content objectively. Notably, the results also challenge some common assumptions: posts from authors with Anglo-American names, often associated with epistemic authority, were not rated as more credible, and male-presenting sources were not favored over female-presenting ones. Taken together, our findings underline that perceived credibility of information is not a fixed quality but shaped by content, identity, and situational cues. Disinformation policies may therefore fall short if they do not account for these more subjective dynamics of trust.
Varieties of Anxieties: Disaggregating Emotion and Voting Behaviour in the COVID-19 Era 53.0
Ranjit Lall, David Vilalta
📚 British Journal of Political Science
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How does anxiety influence voting behaviour? Whereas anxiety is usually treated as a unidimensional emotion, we highlight the multiplicity of socially contingent forms it can assume in response to societal threats. Different anxieties, we posit, can create distinct axes of political competition along which anxious voters exhibit widely varying preferences. We illustrate our argument with unique observational and experimental survey data from Spain’s COVID-19 crisis, showing that individuals anxious about the pandemic’s health consequences favoured parties advocating stringent lockdown restrictions, whereas individuals anxious about its economic disruption preferred parties opposing such measures. Analyzing municipality-level results from Madrid’s 2021 regional election, we additionally provide evidence that COVID-19 boosted support for pro-lockdown parties in areas more exposed to its health effects and support for anti-lockdown parties in areas more exposed to its economic impact. Our findings point to the importance of disaggregating complex emotional states for understanding the determinants of voting behaviour.
Can Development Programs Counter Insurgencies? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan † 53.0
Andrew Beath, Fotini Christia, Ruben Enikolopov
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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We exploit a randomized controlled trial conducted between 2007 and 2011 to identify the effect of Afghanistan's largest local governance and development program on the strength of the insurgency. We find that the program reduced violence, improved economic outcomes, and increased government support in interior regions of the country, but increased violence in villages close to the Pakistani border, where foreign insurgents were more numerous. The results suggest that development programs can be effective in suppressing locally driven insurgencies, but may be counterproductive where insurgents are not reliant on the local population for support. (JEL C93, D74, F35, O15, O17, O18)
Partisan Conversion Through Neighborhood Influence: How Voters Adopt the Partisanship of Their Neighbors 52.7
Jacob R. Brown
📚 The Journal of Politics
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Understanding the Sensitivity of Party Identification Questions in Polarized African Contexts 52.3
Justine M. Davis, Martha Wilfahrt
📚 Political Behavior
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The global rise of political polarization has generated new insights into how polarization affects political behavior. But political polarization may also shape the dynamics of researching such behavior in the first place. This paper argues that in polarized contexts, asking about party identification (PID) during academic surveys can be highly sensitive. We demonstrate this in sub-Saharan Africa, using three forms of evidence. First, a survey of enumerators in Cîte d’Ivoire shows that over 50% feel uncomfortable asking about PID, linking their discomfort to the polarized political climate. Enumerators also believe that such questions reduce honest responses and influence the research encounter itself. Second, data from the Afrobarometer reveals that respondents in polarized countries often self-censor on PID questions more than on traditionally sensitive topics like clientelism, violence, or identity. Finally, interviews and focus groups with Ivorian citizens support these findings, highlighting the sensitivity around PID. These results emphasize that in politically polarized environments, partisanship questions may be uniquely sensitive and impact data quality and the research experience in addition to holding ramifications for political behavior. We conclude with a discussion of implications for survey design and analysis as well as a general call for political scientists to consider what is sensitive, in what context, and for whom when designing surveys.
The Social Origins of Democracy and Authoritarianism Reconsidered: Prussia and Sweden in Comparison 52.2
Erik Bengtsson, Felix Kersting
📚 Comparative Political Studies
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In a large social science literature, unequal rural class structures (“landlordism”) are associated with authoritarian political outcomes. This paper revisits the debate, focus- ing on the landlords’ ideological domination of the lower classes and anti-democratic attitudes in estate-dominated areas. We contrast the authoritarian landlordism model with a perspective where inequality fosters leftist mobilization if landlords fail to assert hegemony. Analyzing Prussia and Sweden–often seen as opposites in terms of their ru- ral class structures–we challenge the view of Sweden as egalitarian, showing its agrarian inequality was similar to Prussia’s. Examining within-country correlations between land inequality and electoral support for Conservatives, Nazis, and voter turnout, we find no evidence supporting the authoritarian landlordism model. Instead, our results empha- size the role of popular mobilization in Sweden and landlords’ weakening influence in Prussia.
Domestic Causes, Global Consequences: The US Mexico City Policy's Global Impact on Intimate Partner Violence 52.1
Mirko Heinzel, Catherine Weaver
📚 International Studies Quarterly
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How does donor domestic ideology and partisan politics shape the lives of people in aid-dependent countries? In this paper, we study the impact of the United States Mexico City Policy, which—when in place—prohibits the disbursement of United States aid funds to foreign Non-Governmental Organizations that provide information or services related to abortion care. Since its 1984 inception, every Democratic president has rescinded it, while every Republican has reinstated it. While previous global public health studies reveal how the Mexico City Policy has actually increased unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortion rates, we argue that these unintended consequences go further than previously understood. We argue that when women lose access to abortion care, they are more likely to lose their lives and suffer life-changing injuries due to violence by their partners. Using global data on United States aid and the health burden caused by intimate partner violence against women in up to 204 countries and territories between 1993 and 2019, we show that the burden of deaths and disability attributed to intimate partner violence increases by approximately 16 percent when the Mexico City Policy is in place.
Drivers of Entrepreneurial Activities Among New‐Coming Ukrainian Female Refugees in Poland 52.0
Aleksandra GaweƂ, Katarzyna Mroczek‐Dąbrowska, Aleksandra Kania, Richard Bednár
✹ Population Space and Place
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Populations affected by armed conflicts are often forced to undergo internal or external displacement. The geographical proximity makes the direct neighbouring countries the main destination for forced migrants, and creates challenges in the reception and integration of newcomers. This study aims at determining what made new‐coming Ukrainian female forced migrants, fleeing the escalation of armed conflict in Spring 2022 from Ukraine, undertake entrepreneurial activities in Poland as a way of becoming self‐reliant and start integrating in the host country, both in the short‐ and long‐term. We used the novel framework, total interpretive structural modelling (TISM), to identify contextual relations among the critical antecedents of the female refugees’ willingness to undertake entrepreneurial activities in the host country shortly after their arrival. Furthermore, the long‐term impact of the drivers of female refugee entrepreneurship was evaluated through in‐depth interviews conducted 2 years after their arrival. In this paper, we establish the decision‐making model of undertaking entrepreneurial activities by new‐comers with 13 antecedents, significantly determined by the host‐country embedded factors. We discover their nature as drivers, linkage factors and dependent factors, as well as the direct and transitive links between them. Among the three fundamental drivers of entrepreneurial activity in the short‐term, namely the attitude of local communities towards refugees, uncertainty about the duration of the invasion and the support of Polish women in gaining life independence by refugees, the latter, understood as the effect of sisterhood solidarity, is the one which acts both shortly after female refugees’ arrival and in the long run, during integration with the host country's society.
(L)earning ‘belonging’: processes of inclusion and exclusion in Malta’s migrant integration programme 51.9
Kirstin Sonne
✹ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
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The MAGA Movement and Political Violence in 2024: Findings from a Nationally Representative Survey 51.9
Garen Wintemute, Bradley Velasquez, Sonia Robinson, Elizabeth A. Tomsich, Mona Wright, Aaron Shev
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Background: The possibility of widespread political violence poses a serious concern for the United States. A nationally representative survey found in 2022 that “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Republicans, as defined, were more supportive than others of political violence. This study updates and expands those findings; the principal comparison is between MAGA Republicans and non-MAGA non-Republicans. Methods: Findings are from Wave 3 of a nationally representative annual longitudinal survey of members of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, conducted May 23-June 14, 2024. All respondents to prior waves who remained in KnowledgePanel were invited to participate. Political party and MAGA affiliations were reported by respondents. Outcomes are expressed as weighted proportions and adjusted prevalence differences (aPDs; these are percentage point (pp) differences), with p-values adjusted for the false discovery rate and reported as q-values. Results: The completion rate was 88.4%; there were 8896 respondents. After weighting, half the sample was female (50.9%, 95% confidence interval (CI) 49.5%, 52.3%); the weighted mean (SD) age was 48.5 (24.9) years. MAGA Republicans were substantially more likely than non-MAGA non-Republicans to endorse violence to effect sociopolitical change generally and to consider violence usually or always justified to advance at least 1 of 21 specific political objectives (MAGA Republicans, 55.9% (95% CI 52.3%, 59.4%); non-MAGA non-Republicans, 25.5% (95% CI 23.7%, 27.2%); aPD 30.1pp (95% CI 26.0pp, 34.2pp), q < 0.001). They were not more willing to commit political violence. Similarly, while MAGA Republicans more frequently predicted that they would be armed in a future setting where they considered political violence to be justified (very or extremely likely: MAGA Republicans, 19.8% (95% CI 17.0%, 22.6%); non-MAGA non-Republicans, 5.5% (95% CI 4.6%, 6.4%); aPD 16.4pp (95% CI 13.3pp, 19.5pp), q < 0.001), they were not more likely to shoot someone (very or extremely likely: MAGA Republicans, 2.1% (95% CI 0.8%, 3.4%); non-MAGA non-Republicans, 1.6% (95% CI 1.0%, 2.1%); aPD 1.5pp (95% CI -0.1pp, 3.0pp), q = 0.43). Prevalences for other Republicans generally fell between those for MAGA Republicans and non-MAGA non-Republicans. On some political violence measures, prevalences were highest among a small, demographically distinct group of non-Republican MAGA supporters. In secondary analyses, MAGA Republicans endorsed statements of beliefs associated with political violence—racism, hostile sexism, homonegativity, transphobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia; support for the QAnon movement and Christian nationalism; conspiracism; trait aggression; and authoritarianism—more frequently than did non-MAGA non-Republicans. Conclusions: In 2024, MAGA Republicans were more likely than others to endorse political violence and beliefs associated with an increased risk of committing violence. They were not more willing to commit political violence themselves, but their endorsement may increase the risk that political violence will occur.
The value of dignity appeals: evidence from a social media experiment 51.7
Paige Bollen, Will Kymlicka, Evan Lieberman, Blair Read
📚 Political Science Research and Methods
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In recent decades, activists and leaders of government and nongovernment organizations have increasingly and explicitly called for greater attention to human dignity in their efforts to promote pro-social relations. In this study, we investigate whether appeals to this core human value actually influence how individuals act with regard to those who might be otherwise ignored or neglected. Using the digital advertising platform on Facebook, we randomly assign ads to over 90,000 adult American users to estimate the effects of dignity appeals on their likelihood of engaging with content concerning people facing homelessness or incarceration. Consistent with preregistered hypotheses and specifications, we find that adding dignity appeals increases the likelihood of positive reactions to such ads, but only when the vulnerable are considered less “blameworthy” for their situation.
Paths to Subjective Poverty Among Midlife and Older Russian‐Speaking Migrants: A Data Mining Approach Using the General Unary Hypotheses Automaton 51.4
Lily Nosraty, Esko Turunen, Anne Kouvonen, Sirpa Wrede
✹ International Migration
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In the Nordic countries, older migrants experience higher poverty rates compared with the majority population. Research on this issue highlights a gap in understanding the complex interplay of ageing, migration and poverty risks. Using the General Unary Hypotheses Automaton (GUHA) data mining approach, we identified various factor combinations that contribute to subjective poverty experiences. We analysed data from the 2019 Care, Health, and Ageing of the Russian‐Speaking Minority (CHARM) study in Finland ( N = 1082, 57% men), which covers migration‐related, socio‐demographic, health and behavioural domains. Our findings reveal 37 distinct paths to subjective poverty involving 13 factors, including health limitations, multi‐morbidity, receipt of housing benefit, religious affiliation, poor self‐rated health, immigration age of 36–55, discrimination and living alone. While health‐related factors predominated, our results highlight the intersection of multiple disadvantages in shaping subjective poverty, providing new insights on the dynamics of migrant poverty.
The need and capacity for resilience in European labour markets: An inequalities in resilience framework 51.1
Rense Nieuwenhuis, Max Thaning, Alzbeta Bartova, Lovisa Backman
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Resilience has become a prominent concept in EU social and economic policy, positioned as a response to megatrends such as technological change, labour market deregulation and demographic shifts. This article critically examines how resilience is conceptualised in EU policy, arguing that it insufficiently accounts for structural inequalities in individuals’ capacities to adapt to risks. Building on cumulative inequality theory and the prevalences and penalties framework, we propose an “inequalities in resilience” framework that distinguishes between the need for resilience—measured by exposure to labour market risks—and the capacity for resilience—measured by the ability to avoid poverty when risks materialise. Using EI-SILC data for 30 countries, 2010–2020, encompassing 3,103,097 individuals, we find that groups with greater need for resilience, particularly those with lower educational attainment and single-parent households, show lower capacity for resilience. This pattern shows a high degree of consistency across different risks and poverty indicators, and national contexts. We conclude that resilience-focused policy must integrate prevention and resource-based interventions while recognising the compounded, path-dependent, and status-based nature of inequality. Addressing these layered disadvantages requires coordinated, inclusive policy designs that go beyond individual adaptation to tackle the structural roots of disadvantage.
Nonviolent alternatives reduce external support for rebel groups: Evidence from two cross-national survey experiments 51.1
Matthew Cebul, Jonathan Pinckney
📚 Journal of Peace Research
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How do nonviolent alternatives affect international support for violent rebel groups? Armed rebellions are often sustained by outside sympathy and support, which conditions global coordination to end intrastate conflict. Studies on reducing such support largely neglect how the emergence of alternative, nonviolent resistance groups impacts international support for violent resistance. Nonviolent alternatives could plausibly increase support for armed rebellion by legitimizing the cause of resistance or reduce support by delegitimizing the means of violent rebellion relative to nonviolent alternatives. To examine this puzzle, we conducted two online survey experiments across more than 30 countries using a pre-post design to capture changes in attitudes toward a hypothetical violent rebel group before and after the emergence of an alternative resistance group. We randomly vary both the presence and features of the alternative group, including explicitly nonviolent rhetoric, government repression and concessions, and short descriptors meant to signal the alternative group’s capacity to fill psychological needs for agency, justice, and belonging. We find that alternative resistance options consistently reduce support for armed rebellion, including among those originally most supportive of it, and that respondents strongly prefer explicitly nonviolent alternatives, yet neither the material efficacy nor the emotional resonance of those alternatives have a substantial additional effect.
Basic Income and Labor Supply: Evidence from an RCT in Germany 50.9
Sarah Bernhard, Sandra Bohmann, Susann Fiedler, Maximilian Kasy, JĂŒrgen Schupp, Frederik Schwerter, Carolyn Fisher
đŸ”„ Preprint
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How does basic income (a regular, unconditional, guaranteed cash transfer) impact labor supply? We show that in search models of the labor market with income effects, this impact is theoretically ambiguous: Employment and job durations might increase or decrease, match surplus might be shifted to workers or employers, and worker surplus might be reallocated between wages and job amenities. We thus turn to empirical evidence to study this impact. We conducted a pre-registered RCT in Germany, starting 2021, where recipients received 1200 Euro/month for three years. We draw on both administrative and survey data, and find no extensive margin (employment) response, and no impact on job transitions from either non-employment or employment. We do find a small statistically insignificant intensive margin shift to part-time employment, which implies an excess burden (reduction of government revenues) of ca 7.5% of the transfer. We furthermore observe a small increase of enrollment in training or education. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)
Gendered pathways to wealth? The self-assessed relevance of different accumulation channels among women and men across the wealth distribution 50.8
Theresa Nutz, Nicole Kapelle, Daria Tisch
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Wealth inequality results from stratified access to accumulation opportunities, relating to differences in income, financial behavior, and transfers. Yet, it remains unclear whether these wealth accumulation channels differ in their perceived relevance for women and men along the wealth distribution. A deeper understanding of such perceptions is crucial for explaining attitudes toward inequality, shaping policy legitimacy, and uncovering the narratives that sustain or challenge the economic status quo. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP; waves 2017 and 2019), we compare the self-assessed relevance of eight different accumulation channels. Regression models (N=23,857) reveal that dependent employment is widely perceived as relevant for wealth accumulation across the wealth distribution, particularly for men. Individuals in higher wealth quartiles attribute a greater relevance to a broader range of accumulation channels. Women perceive marriage as more important for accumulating wealth, regardless of how wealthy they are. Women in the top wealth quartile perceive financial transfers as contributing more to their wealth than men do. These findings suggest that women ascribe a higher relevance to relational and dependent channels, while men emphasize the relevance of self-generated wealth. This reflects persistent gender-segregated economic structures that continue to reinforce the gender wealth gap.
Career Civil Servants’ Socially Embedded Responses to Democratic Backsliding 50.8
Saar Alon-Barkat, Sharon Gilad, Nir Kosti, Ilana Shpaizman
📚 Perspectives on Politics
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Recent studies portray civil servants as potential guardians against populist attempts to undermine liberal democracy. However in polarized societies, bureaucrats, like citizens, tend to hold divergent perceptions of the threat that politicians’ actions pose to democracy. This, in turn, likely shapes bureaucrats’ responses. We examine this in the context of the attempt by Israel’s extreme right-wing populist government to curtail the powers and independence of the Israeli Supreme Court and replace legal advisors with political appointees (hereafter the “legal overhaul”). We employ a mixed-methods design, combining a survey, interviews, and a focus group with career civil servants, showing that those who perceive the legal overhaul as a threat to democracy are more inclined to exit government and less likely to voice and exert effort at work. These findings are attributed to respondents’ views of the legal overhaul as leading to future politicization, curtailed influence, and a threat to their role as civil servants.
Are Donors Really Responding? Analyzing the Impact of Global Restrictions on NGOs 50.7
Suparna Chaudhry, Andrew Heiss
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Foreign donors routinely use nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to deliver aid abroad. However, recent decades have witnessed a global cascade of restrictive anti-NGO legislation. How have foreign aid donors responded and adapted to this legal crackdown on NGOs? Using original data from all countries that received aid from 1981–2012, we assess the impact of anti-NGO laws on total flows of official foreign aid, the nature of projects funded, and the channels used for distributing this aid. Overall, we find that donors scale back their operations in repressive countries. However, rather than completely withdraw, we also find that donors redirect funds within restrictive countries by decreasing funds for politically sensitive issues in favor of regime-compatible causes. Donors also channel more aid through domestic rather than foreign NGOs; however, this change is by no means a perfect substitute. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for official aid donors, INGOs, and local groups working on contentious causes such as elections, human rights, media, corruption, and advocacy.
Between cultural promotion and nation building: Analysing the drivers of Basque public television consumption over a decade 50.7
Jaume Doménech-Beltrån, Lidia Valera-Ordaz
📚 Media, Culture & Society
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Public broadcasting systems are tasked with providing citizens with high-quality information and exposing them to diversity, based on professional autonomy and political independence. In polarised pluralist systems like that of Spain, public broadcasters often face politicisation, and political attitudes are strong predictors of media exposure. In Spain – alongside the national public broadcasting service (RTVE) – several regional broadcasting systems were established by regional governments during the decentralisation of the 1980s to strengthen regional cultural identities and promote minority languages. However, the predictors driving the consumption of these regional broadcasts have remained unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by analysing the predictors of exposure to Basque public television (EiTB) over an 11-year period (2009–2020), drawing on four post-electoral studies and covering four Basque regional elections. Through logistic regression analysis, we examine how national identity, Basque nationalism, mother tongue and place of birth predict EiTB consumption, while controlling for variables such as age, sex, education level and ideological position on the left-right spectrum. The findings reveal that voting for Basque nationalist parties and feeling exclusively Basque are the key consistent predictors for EiTB consumption over time. We discuss the normative implications of these findings and argue that the role of Basque public television has fluctuated between cultural promotion and nation building.
Privilege or marginalization: how Chinese youth from divergent class backgrounds make sense of racism in the U.S. and Australia 50.5
Weirong Guo, Qing Tingting Liu
✹ Ethnic and Racial Studies
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The British Conservative Party and Europe: The Choosing of John Major 50.4
Philip Cowley, John Garry
📚 British Journal of Political Science
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This article provides an empirical analysis of voting behaviour in the second ballot of the 1990 Conservative leadership contest that resulted in John Major becoming party leader and prime minister. Seven hypotheses of voting behaviour are generated from the extant literature relating voting to socio-economic variables (occupational and educational background), political variables (parliamentary experience, career status, age and electoral marginality) and ideological variables (drawn from survey data on MPs' positions on economic, European and moral issues). These hypotheses are tested using data on voting intentions gathered from published lists of MPs' declarations, interviews with each of the leadership campaign teams, and correspondence with MPs. Bivariate relationships are presented, followed by logistic regression analysis to isolate the unique impact that each variable had on voting. This shows that educational background, parliamentary experience and (especially) attitudes to Europe were the key factors determining voting. The importance of Europe in the contest is particularly instructive: the severe problems for Major's leadership which were caused by the issue can be attributed to, and understood in the context of, the 1990 contest in which he became leader.
Multi-directional migration, land ownership and livelihood strategies in the Peruvian Andes: conceptualising urban-rural return flows during the COVID-19 pandemic 50.1
CĂ©line Delmotte, Conny Davidsen, Emmanuelle Piccoli
✹ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
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The Political Legacy of Elite Repression 50.0
Leonid Peisakhin, Didac Queralt
📚 Comparative Political Studies
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Most work on the legacies of violence studies mass repression. In this paper, we explore the longterm effects of selective repression of local elites on ordinary community members who had not been subject to direct repression. Drawing on the literature on the legacy of violence against civilians, we hypothesize that elite-targeted repression creates a political backlash in the affected communities. Examining the legacy of Nazi-era repression of Catholic clergy in Bavaria we ask whether historical repression against Catholic priests is associated with higher support for Christian Democrats after WWII. We find that municipalities where Catholic priests had been repressed are more likely to vote for Christian Democrats in the post-war elections. The legacy of priest repression on voting behavior persists into the present, although its magnitude wanes overtime. These findings suggest that repression of elites leaves lasting intergenerational legacies on mass political and social behavior.
The Europeanisation of policy preferences: cross-national similarity and convergence 2014–2024 50.0
Miriam Sorace
📚 Journal of European Public Policy
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Measuring the Emperor's Clothes: Estimating Latent Opposition to Authoritarian Regimes with Randomized Response Questions 49.9
Robert Kubinec, Amr Yakout
đŸ”„ Preprint
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While many studies of public opinion in authoritarian regimes rely on list experiments to overcome sensitivity bias, we show in this paper that a different technique, the crosswise variant of the randomized response design, has superior performance at measuring latent opposition to authoritarian regimes with fewer assumptions. To show the power of this design, we randomly assigned a panel of 924 Tunisian survey respondents to receive either a direct question about support for Tunisian President Kais Saied or a randomized response question. Our results reveal that between 10% to 30% of Tunisians oppose the president but would not report this opposition on a direct question. We further employed a Bayesian parameterization of the randomized response design to decompose the sensitivity bias and model latent opposition and bias as a function of survey covariates. We find that ideological and policy disagreement with the president strongly predicts latent opposition, but that these same measures are negatively related to sensitivity bias. As a result, we show that respondents who are ideologically closer to the president--that is, the moderate opposition--tend to be more afraid of reporting their resistance to the regime than the more radical opposition.
Skill Depreciation during Unemployment: Evidence from Panel Data † 49.9
Jonathan Cohen, Andrew C. Johnston, Attila Lindner
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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We examine the depreciation of skills among unemployed German workers using a panel of skill measures linked to administrative data. Both the reemployment hazard and reemployment earnings steadily decline with unemployment duration. Indicators of depression and loneliness also rise substantially. However, we find no decline in a wide range of cognitive and noncognitive skills while workers remain unemployed. We find the same pattern in a panel of American workers. The results imply that skill depreciation in general human capital is unlikely to be a major explanation for observed duration dependence in reemployment outcomes. (JEL E24, E32, J22, J24, J31, J64)
Insurgency, Border Contiguity, and Social Conflict in Neighbor Countries 49.8
Kaderi Bukari, Ore Koren
📚 Journal of Conflict Resolution
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This study investigates how an insurgency in one state can intensify social conflict in a bordering state, focusing on the 2015 Burkina Faso insurgency and its impacts on northern Ghana. Building on past research, we theorize four pathways that can link insurgency to social conflict across the border. We use a mixed-methods approach, combining synthetic control models, fixed-effects panel data analyses, and extensive fieldwork across multiple communities, and find clear support for two pathways: insurgents using Ghana as a place for obtaining resources and diverted security forces creating vacuums exploited by bandits. The findings show that research and policy should consider more the interaction across multiple types of violence and varied geopolitical spaces in other susceptible world regions.
The Impact of Trade Liberalization in the Presence of Political Distortions † 49.3
Sebastian JĂ€vervall, Roza Khoban
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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Political distortions are prevalent in many developing countries, implying substantial productivity losses. This paper investigates the impact of trade liberalization on political distortions in India. First, using variation in political turnover, we identify that politicians distort resources in favor of politically connected firms. Second, we show that reduced tariffs on input goods significantly decrease the distortionary effect of political connections, as trade reduces firms' dependence on politicians for sourcing inputs. The results suggest a new margin for gains from trade through reduced politically driven misallocation, implying that trade can address a widespread source of productivity losses. (JEL D22, D72, F13, F14, O14, O19, O24)
Nature Made the State: Exploring the Effect of Disasters on Centralization 49.2
Sung Min Han, Min Tang, Jinhai Yu
📚 Comparative Political Studies
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This study explores the institutional consequences of natural disasters on the distribution of authority between national and subnational governments. Specifically, it examines how disasters influence fiscal and administrative centralization and how this effect varies with their geographic distribution. We argue that natural disasters act as external shocks that increase institutional centralization and the centralizing effect of disasters is more pronounced when they occur farther from the capital or are widely dispersed. Using data from 84 countries (1962–2018), we find support for both the centralizing impact of disasters and the moderating effect of geographic distribution. Results also reveal variations in the effects across different types of disasters, dimensions of centralization, and time lags reflecting cumulative impacts. Overall, the findings suggest that, contrary to the global trend of decentralization, natural disasters drive national and subnational units toward greater centralization, highlighting the adaptive capacity of modern states in response to environmental shocks.
Is There a Mobility Effect? On Methodological Issues in the Mobility Contrast Model 49.1
Xi Song, Xiang Zhou
📚 Sociological Methods & Research
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Social mobility scholars have long been interested in estimating the effect of intergenerational mobility, typically measured by differences in the socioeconomic status between parents and offspring, on later-life outcomes of offspring. In a 2022 article “Heterogeneous Effects of Intergenerational Social Mobility: An Improved Method and New Evidence,” Luo proposes a new approach called the mobility contrast model (MCM) to define and estimate mobility effects. We argue that the MCM is inherently flawed due to its reliance on the coding scheme used for the categorical variables of social origin and destination. Specifically, when different coding schemes are applied, the estimands defined in the MCM bear distinct meanings, involve different but equally arbitrary constraints, and sometimes yield contradictory results. Moreover, regardless of the coding scheme, these estimands do not adequately capture the sociological concept of a mobility effect. To illustrate this, we reanalyze the Occupational Changes in a Generation Study data used in Luo’s study, highlighting the inconsistency of results when dummy coding versus effect coding schemes are used.
Understanding Voter Fatigue: Election Frequency and Electoral Abstention Approval 48.9
Filip Kostelka
📚 British Journal of Political Science
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The existing literature shows that frequent elections depress electoral participation and contribute to the global decline in voter turnout. However, the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This paper investigates the sources of voter fatigue and hypothesizes that frequent elections make electoral abstention more acceptable to citizens. It tests the main hypothesis via an original pre-registered survey experiment fielded in five countries with a total sample size of 12,221 respondents. The results provide pioneering evidence on the psychological effects of election frequency. They confirm that high election frequency increases the social acceptability of electoral abstention and that this effect is proportional to the number of past elections. It can be equally observed among all major social groups, including politically engaged citizens and those who believe that voting is a civic duty. These findings hold major implications for our understanding of voter turnout and democratic institutional engineering.
A Replication of “Did New Public Management Matter? An Empirical Analysis of the Outsourcing and Decentralization Effects on Public Sector Size” 48.9
Yiying Chen
📚 Public Administration
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This manuscript replicates and extends the work of Alonso et al. focusing on the effects of New Public Management practices—outsourcing and decentralization—on public sector size in terms of government expenditure and employment. The narrow replication confirms the original findings: outsourcing increases government expenditure, whereas decentralization reduces it, with neither practice affecting employment. The wide replications add nuances: while the long‐term results align with the original study, recent data indicate that outsourcing may have narrowed its cost gap with in‐house delivery, and the cost‐reducing impact of decentralization has partially waned. It suggests that the influences of these NPM practices on public sector size have diminished in recent years. This replication illuminates the temporal complexity and evolving nature of the NPM practices and their impacts on public sector size.
From students to refugees: students’ (im)mobility in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine 48.7
Ezenwa E. Olumba
✹ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
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Political Activists are Not Driven by Instrumental Motives: Evidence from Two Natural Field Experiments 48.7
Anselm Hager, Lukas Hensel, Johannes Hermle, Christopher Roth
📚 British Journal of Political Science
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Are political activists driven by instrumental motives such as making a career in politics or mobilizing voters? We implement two natural field experiments in which party activists are randomly informed that canvassing is i) effective at mobilizing voters, or ii) effective for enhancing activists’ political careers. We find no effect of the treatments on activists’ intended and actual canvassing behaviour. The null finding holds despite a successful manipulation check and replication study, high statistical power, a natural field setting, and an unobtrusive measurement strategy. Using an expert survey, we show that the null finding shifted Bayesian posterior beliefs about the treatment’s effectiveness toward zero. The evidence thus casts doubt on two popular hypothesized instrumental drivers of political activism – voter persuasion and career concerns – and points toward expressive benefits as more plausible motives.
Changing the lens: The contingency of results from conjoint experiments on the outcome variable and the estimand 48.6
Clareta Treger
📚 Research & Politics
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Conjoint experiments have become popular in political science for studying opinions, attitudes, and preferences on various issues. While the methodological literature discusses two dependent variables—forced-choice and rating outcomes—many studies continue to use (or report) only the former. Additionally, many studies primarily focus on analyzing causal quantities—Average Marginal Component Effects (AMCEs) and do not report the descriptive estimates—Marginal Means (MMs). This article highlights the contingency of results from conjoint experiments on the outcome variable and the estimand used. It calls for the inclusion of the rating outcome and for reporting the MMs alongside AMCEs. As the two outcome variables elicit distinct preferences, it explains how relying solely on one may obscure important findings and limit the insights gained from the experiment. This is particularly consequential for the analysis of MMs. These arguments are demonstrated by replicating and reanalyzing recently published conjoint studies. The article concludes with practical recommendations for applied researchers.
The (Sometimes Untraceable) Origins of Policy Ideas in Congress: An Analysis of Seven Landmark Laws 48.5
Jeremy Gelman
📚 Legislative Studies Quarterly
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Research on lawmaking suggests enactments are constructed in various ways. Although multiple approaches are documented in the literature, political scientists do not know which are used more often. In this paper, I examine how laws are created by studying seven modern landmark laws enacted during various policymaking windows. I use a text reuse approach to recursively trace each policy idea in these enactments to the original version proposed in Congress. My results show that (1) laws vary dramatically in how they are constructed, even within similar bill types; (2) when ideas linger on Congress's agenda, it is usually only for a few years, and (3) about 15% of ideas are added at the end of the legislative process where tracking the sponsor is impossible. These findings highlight the dynamism in bill construction. Among these laws, there is no “typical process,” many members contribute at many stages, and some of the largest, most consequential enactments have portions with unknown origins. The results contribute nuance to our understanding of legislative effectiveness, how it might be measured, and insight into how members engage in the legislative process when they anticipate a policy window opening.
How Do Electoral Outcomes Affect Campaign Contributions? The Role of Personal Loyalty and Investment Motives 48.4
Miguel R. Rueda, Nelson A. Ruiz
📚 British Journal of Political Science
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How do electoral outcomes affect campaign contributions? We argue that in contexts where personal connections to the candidate and investment motivations dominate ideology and partisanship as drivers of donations, two main factors shape donors’ future behaviour: 1) government benefits accrued by donors (for example, contracts) and 2) whether the supported candidate runs again in future elections. Using data from Colombian mayoral elections, a context with no re-election, weak parties, and non-ideological races, we find that donating to the winning candidate reduces the probability of donating in the next election. We further show that, among donors to the winner, those who receive a contract from the municipality are more likely to continue donating than those without contracts. The findings highlight the importance of personal loyalty to the candidate and the fulfilment of donors’ investment expectations determining campaign contributions in non-established democracies.
Toward an Empirical Comparison of Bourdieu and Latour: Relational Theories in the Sociology of Poverty 48.3
Floris Noordhoff
đŸ”„ Preprint
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This article undertakes a comparative exploration of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) in the context of poverty research. Drawing on various empirical studies derived from a larger qualitative project—based on 216 in-depth interviews with long-term poor households—it examines how each framework accounts for capital conversion, constrained agency, and the reproduction of structural exclusion. Although both theorists promote relational and anti-essentialist perspectives, they differ markedly in ontological orientation and analytic focus. Bourdieu highlights the structuring effects of fields, habitus, and symbolic violence, while Latour centres on translation, mediation, and the generative power of heterogeneous networks. Through four thematic case studies—debt, welfare bureaucracy, neighbourhood stigma, and the informal economy—the analysis demonstrates that each framework reveals distinct yet complementary dimensions of poverty. Whereas Bourdieu offers powerful tools to explain the institutional reproduction of inequality, Latour draws attention to the situated agency of actors navigating complex material and social assemblages. The article argues for a relational synthesis that acknowledges both enduring field structures and contingent actor-networks. It concludes that poverty persists not through structure or contingency alone, but through the recursive entanglement of both.
Women climate scientists are connected, productive, and successful but have shorter careers 48.2
Chris C. Martin, Andrew Lockley, Steve Hendricks, Cory J. Clark, Ishita Mundra, Nils Matzner
📚 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Scholars have long been concerned about gender representation in scientific research but there has been little work on gender differences in participation and performance in climate science, a field that engages with both male-majority disciplines (e.g., geosciences, engineering) and female-majority disciplines (e.g., life sciences, medical science). This has implications for both gender equity and viewpoint representation. Sampling over 400,000 publications and a similar number of authors, we examine gender differences in several scholarly outcomes including publication count, career survival, coauthor gender, journal status, and mean citation count. We find men and women are similarly productive, successful, and connected, though women have shorter research careers and thus fewer papers. We also find gender homophily effects in collaboration, but no evidence of gender bias in peer review.
Geographic Variation in Multigenerational Mobility 48.0
Martin Nybom, Jan Stuhler
📚 Sociological Methods & Research
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Using complete-count register data spanning three generations, we document spatial patterns in inter- and multi-generational mobility in Sweden. Across municipalities, grandfather–child correlations in education or earnings tend to be larger than the square of the parent–child correlations, suggesting that the latter understate status transmission in the long run. Yet, conventional parent–child correlations capture regional differences in long-run transmission and therefore remain useful for comparative purposes. We further find that the within-country association between mobility and income inequality (the “Great Gatsby Curve”) is at least as strong in the multi- as in the inter-generational case. Interpreting those patterns through the lens of a latent factor model, we find that regional differences in mobility primarily reflect variation in the transmission of latent advantages, rather than in how those advantages translate into observed outcomes.
Attending Church Encourages Acceptance of Atheists? Suppression Effects in Religion and Politics Research 47.7
Paul A. Djupe, Amanda J. Friesen, Andrew R. Lewis, Anand E. Sokhey, Jacob R. Neiheisel, Zachary D. Broeren, Ryan P. Burge
📚 Political Behavior
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A proliferation of religion variables presents opportunities for those studying religion and politics in the U.S. However, many studies in this growing subfield demonstrate the pitfalls of reporting the “independent” effects of variables without qualification. This is especially evident in work on Christian nationalism where researchers often make the claim that worship attendance promotes more pro-social or liberal outcomes, while Christian nationalism promotes more conservative and less pro-social outcomes. We demonstrate that this finding—and others like it—represents a new version of an old problem: a particular structure of relationships between variables that can induce sign switches based on suppression effects (Lenz and Sahn in Political Analysis 29(3):356–369, 2021). While we do not encourage skipping controls, some commonly reported results warrant caution. Researchers should generally avoid unconditional claims about attendance encouraging liberalism. We point a way forward that prioritizes theories of religious communication and encourages the careful examination of relationships via interactions.
Correction to: “Location and Visa‐Category Determinants of Naturalization in Australia” 47.4
✹ International Migration
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From “what” and “when” to “how” and “why”: Moving the study of psychological dispositions and political preferences forward 47.3
Christopher M. Federico, Ariel Malka
📚 Political Psychology
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Electoral participation and satisfaction with democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 47.2
Filip Kostelka, Lukåƥ Linek, Jan Rovny, Michael Ơkvrƈåk
📚 Political Science Research and Methods
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Does democratic satisfaction drive voter turnout, or does voting increase satisfaction with democracy? This paper explores the satisfaction-participation nexus in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), where democratic dissatisfaction is prominent. It tests preregistered hypotheses using a five-wave panel survey from the Czech 2023 presidential election and a pooled dataset from five CEE countries. Unlike previous studies from Western Europe, it finds evidence for both mechanisms: pre-election satisfaction correlates with participation, but, simultaneously, voters experience a stronger election-related increase in satisfaction than abstainers. Further analyses reveal that the strong increases in satisfaction are driven by election winners and begin already during the election campaign. Our findings highlight the specificities of the satisfaction-participation link and elections’ legitimizing effects in newer democracies.
Mainstreaming and Transnationalization of Anti-Gender Ideas through Social Media: The Case of CitizenGO 47.1
Nicola Righetti, Aytalina Kulichkina, Bruna Almeida Paroni, Zsofia Fanni Cseri, Sofia Iriarte Aguirre, Kateryna Maikovska
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Social media platforms can be effective tools for mainstreaming and transnationalization of radical positions. Anti-gender ideas have particularly gained traction transnationally in recent years. Despite extensive research on the anti-gender movement, the specific role of social media remains underexplored. How do anti-gender organizations use social media to strategically mainstream and transnationalize their agenda? This study addresses this overarching question by focusing on CitizenGO, a digital advocacy organization that holds a key position within the anti-gender transnational advocacy network. We examine its multilingual social media network and activities over a decade (2013-2022) using computational and digital methods. The findings indicate that CitizenGO uses a sophisticated network of social media accounts to coordinate and amplify anti-gender messages across different languages and regions. The study suggests that CitizenGO’s strategic use of social media is aimed at mainstreaming and globalizing anti-gender agendas, contributing new insights into the mechanisms of digital advocacy and the transnational expansion of anti-gender networks.
Global Finance, Political Business Cycles, and the Politics of Foreign Reserves 47.1
Ben Cormier, Patrick E Shea
📚 International Studies Quarterly
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Foreign reserves provide developing countries with resources for managing the effects of economic shocks and crises. Why do reserve levels vary across the developing world? Political business cycles (PBCs) have been associated with reserve level decreases, as incumbents draw them down to fund policies that provide voters with material benefits before elections. But governments can also obtain capital by borrowing on bond markets, getting the resources needed to fund PBC policy efforts through alternative means. We hypothesize and find that this means global finance conditions the PBC effect on foreign reserve levels. When pre-election global interest rates are high and borrowing is expensive, governments do draw down reserves. But when pre-election global interest rates are low and borrowing is cheap, governments borrow rather than deplete reserves. This helps explain variation in reserve levels, and thus variation in resilience against economic shocks, across developing countries. The study further suggests the importance of accounting for reserve use in studies of PBC effects on debt, adds novel PBC identification strategies to the literature, and signals how the politics of diverse areas of economic policymaking can be affected by global financial conditions.
Absolute and Relative Mobility: Two Frameworks for Connecting Intergenerational Mobility in Absolute and Relative Terms 46.5
Deirdre Bloome
📚 Sociological Methods & Research
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Researchers concerned about intergenerational inequalities study absolute and relative mobility (e.g., whether people’s adult incomes exceed their parents’ incomes in dollars or ranks ). Absolute and relative mobility are connected, by definition. Yet, they are not equivalent. Indeed, they often diverge. To illuminate why, when, and for whom such divergence occurs—and why, when, and for whom convergence is possible—this article provides two frameworks for connecting absolute and relative mobility. One framework is formal and one is typological. Both frameworks center micro-level socioeconomic experiences across generations. Illustrative analyses employ these frameworks using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data. Results suggest that divergent experiences, like upward absolute mobility despite downward relative mobility, may be more common among more advantaged social groups. Future researchers could use the two frameworks introduced here to further advance our understanding of how intergenerational inequalities evolve differently in absolute and relative terms.
Democracies Still in Peril: Reexamining Revenue Mobilization in Liberalizing Developing Economies 46.4
Ida Bastiaens, Nita Rudra
📚 PS: Political Science & Politics
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Do developing-country democracies continue to struggle with revenue loss post-trade liberalization? This article revisits the evidence presented in Democracies in Peril and confirms that, despite critiques suggesting otherwise, a substantial revenue shock persists following tariff reductions, and democracies in less developed countries (LDCs) remain particularly vulnerable. Drawing on updated data from the World Development Indicators and supplemental checks with the International Centre for Tax and Development database, we show that democracies have lagged behind non-democracies in compensating for lost trade tax revenues—even after reforms aimed at expanding income taxes and value-added taxes. In addition to emphasizing ongoing domestic political obstacles in liberalizing democracies, we examine emerging challenges that impede revenue generation in LDCs. We conclude with suggested directions for future research on the politics of revenue generation in LDC democracies, emphasizing how improvements in public goods provision and global tax initiatives could help to end the downward cycle in revenue generation.
Psychological dispositions and political attitudes in a hyperpartisan context 46.4
Elizabeth Simas, Sebastian Ege
📚 Political Psychology
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The Wartime Roots of Rural Governance: Militias’ Evolving Roles in Post-Conflict Peru 46.4
NicolĂĄs Taccone
📚 Comparative Political Studies
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Under what conditions can militias enhance governance in post-conflict settings? Drawing on nine months of fieldwork in rural Peru, this paper develops a theoretical framework to explain militias’ varied post-civil war trajectories, focusing on their wartime relationships with the military and local communities. I argue that militias with autonomy from the military and strong community ties are more likely to persist and strengthen post-war rural governance. By protecting communities from civil war violence, these militias earn social legitimacy and become institutionalized, prompting their members and local villagers to repurpose them for post-conflict governance roles—an overlooked yet essential trajectory for militias in post-conflict settings. To substantiate my argument, I conduct a comparative historical analysis in Peru’s rural periphery using multiple site-intensive methods, including interviews, archival work, and participant observation. The paper offers insights into the historical legacies of violence, institutional change, and governance in areas with minimal state presence.
The effects of social media criticism against public health institutions on trust, emotions, and social media engagement 46.3
Jonathan Y. Lee
📚 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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In recent years, trust in US public health and science institutions has faced unprecedented declines, particularly among Republicans/conservatives. To what extent might institutional criticism on social media be responsible for such politically polarized declines in institutional trust? Two online survey experiments (total N = 6,800), using samples roughly reflective of the US adult population, examined the effects of key types of criticism against the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The results suggest that just a single exposure to any of the key types of criticism was sufficient to undermine institutional trust. While an institutional rebuttal was partially able to reverse these effects, residual declines in trust were substantial enough to cause decreased intentions to adhere to the AHRQ/CDC health recommendation featured in the experiments. While institutions should, therefore, be concerned about all types of social media criticism, those featuring morally charged trust-undermining narratives attacking the integrity of the AHRQ/CDC generated dramatically more anger (i.e., moral outrage), which in turn attracted social media engagement preferences likely to promote viral spread and exacerbate preexisting institutional politicization and issue polarization. These results suggest that efforts to bolster institutional trust should pay special attention to criticisms featuring integrity-based trust-undermining narratives.
New Gig Work or Changes in Reporting? Understanding Self-Employment Trends in Tax Data 46.3
Andrew Garin, Emilie Jackson, Dmitri Koustas
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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We show that increases in the share of workers reporting self-employment to the IRS are not associated with changes in firm-reported payments to “gig” and other contract workers after 2005 but are driven primarily by self-reported earnings of individuals in the EITC phase-in range. We examine a regression discontinuity design that generates exogenous variation in tax rates at the end of the year after labor supply decisions are already sunk and find tax code incentives increase self-employment reporting conditional on actual labor supply. We show that reporting effects have grown over time as knowledge of the tax code spreads. (JEL C83, H24, H31, J22, J23)
Exit as Voice: Implications of Russia’s War for the Understanding of Dissent under Authoritarianism 46.2
Evgeny Roshchin
📚 Perspectives on Politics
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Building on the experience of Russian antiwar emigration in 2022, this article reinterprets the categories of “exit” and “voice” to better understand dissent under repressive political regimes. It argues that exit can function as a form of voice in contexts where other forms of voicing discontent are effectively eliminated by repression. This perspective on exit opens the category of voice to a normative conceptualization, defining it as an expression of civic identity. Acting on this identity in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine leads dissenting citizens either into self-imposed exile or inner exile. The article identifies three key modalities of voice available to dissenting citizens: exit-as-voice, voice-after-exit, and oblique voice. In all these modalities, voice is primarily performative, shaped by the political and ethical constraints that emerge from the interplay between repression and resistance. The article draws on an autoethnography of exit within Russian academia and on accounts of resistance both inside and outside Russia.
Internal cleavages and changing party system in indigenous politics – The Sámi Parliament of Norway 46.2
Torvald Falch, Per Selle, Jonas Stein
📚 Party Politics
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Indigenous politics is different from “normal” politics. It is about power within the state and against the state in which fragmentation is commonly seen as fragility. Political party competition is therefore extremely rare, and interests’ representation is generally not organized through political parties. In this article, we analyze a unique and deviant case – Norway – where Indigenous system-building develops thorough party politics based on internal cleavages. Using unique survey data on Sámi voters ( N = 1134) we show how voters for the Sámi parties are divided on the question of Sámi self-determination and that this has transformed the party system from a “one-party dominant system” towards a two-party system based on an internal cleavage concerning the degree and type of self-determination. This transformation has been made possible by changes in the electoral system, a substantial increase in the Sámi electoral roll and major advancements in Indigenous rights in Norway.
Not Playing Favorites: Parents and the Value of Equal Opportunity † 46.1
James Berry, Rebecca Dizon-Ross, Maulik Jagnani
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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We conduct two experiments to identify the value parents place on equality of opportunity when investing in children. The experiments exogenously vary short-run returns to educational investments to identify the weight placed on equalizing “opportunity” (child-level investment) relative to maximizing “returns” (total household earnings) or to equalizing “outcomes” (child-level expected earnings). While parents in both experiments place some weight on maximizing returns, they also display a strong preference for equalizing opportunities and are willing to forgo 15–45 percent of their earnings to do so. Parents in higher-income countries also care about equalizing outcomes, while parents in lower-income countries do not. (JEL D63, J12, J13, O15)
Political Opportunity Structure Conditions the Legacy of Political Violence 45.9
Austin Horng-En Wang
📚 Journal of Conflict Resolution
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Previous studies render contradictory evidence linking political repression before and political participation after democratization. This article suggests that the perceived political opportunity conditions the long-term effect of political violence: victims punish the authoritarian successor party only if their district is not dominated by it. This hypothesis is examined through the unique context of Taiwan, where the former authoritarian party KMT is still competitive after democratization. Analysis of a newly published White Terror Dataset including 13,206 victims during the martial law period (1949–1987) shows that, if districts have more White Terror victims, KMT received more votes in KMT-dominated districts and fewer votes in districts without KMT domination. The psychological mechanism is supported by a pre-registered survey experiment ( n = 910), showing that the White Terror priming increases KMT’s vote when KMT leads in the poll. The result reconciles previous findings and explains authoritarian successor parties’ resilience in new democracies.
Aspirational Politics of Talent Acquisition: Entrepreneurial Limits and Indian Short Video Platforms 45.8
Rahul Mukherjee
📚 Social Media + Society
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Local short video platforms in India such as Moj and Josh have encountered mixed success in wooing talented creators and new users to their platforms. Some of the challenges they have faced suggest the limits of aspirational politics which is entangled with aspects of authenticity and relatability as well as the political economy of start-up apps and platform capitalisms. I endeavor to understand TikTok’s success in India and also comprehend in what ways Indian short video platforms tried to replicate TikTok’s algorithmic logics and creator/talent acquisition strategies within the cultural context of vernacular creativity in India. The article connects discussions of the popularity of short video platforms with recruitment strategies to tap influential content creators in provincial India. The article contends that while theorizing aspirational politics, it is not enough to study (in isolation) how creators aspire to be more successful and gain more followers and influence. Aspirations are also actively fashioned and nurtured by the platform’s talent scouts, content directors, and studio heads. The Indian government along with corporations also creates aspirational discourses. I conceptualize aspirational politics and entrepreneurial limits in these slippages and ruptures across individual desires and state-corporate-platform discourses of aspiration and entrepreneurship.
Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic ÇatalhöyĂŒk 45.5
Eren YĂŒncĂŒ, Ayça KĂŒĂ§ĂŒkakdağ Doğu, Damla Kaptan, Muhammed Sıddık Kılıç, Camilla Mazzucato, Merve N. GĂŒler, Elifnaz Eker, BĂŒĆŸra Katırcıoğlu, Maciej ChyleƄski, Kıvılcım BaƟak Vural, Ekin Sağlıcan, Gözde Atağ, Defne Bozkurt, Jessica Pearson, Arda Sevkar, N. Ezgi AltınÄ±ĆŸÄ±k, Marco Milella, Cansu Karamurat, ƞevval AktĂŒrk, Emre Deniz YurttaƟ, Nisan Yıldız, Dilek Koptekin, Sevgi Yorulmaz, Duygu Deniz Kazancı, Ayça Aydoğan, Kanat GĂŒrĂŒn, Eline M.J. Schotsmans, Jana Anvari, Eva Rosenstock, Jennifer Byrnes, Peter F. Biehl, David Orton, Vendela Kempe Lagerholm, Hasan Can Gemici, Milena Vasic, Arkadiusz Marciniak, Çiğdem Atakuman, Yılmaz Selim Erdal, Emrah Kırdök, Marin Pilloud, Clark Spencer Larsen, Scott D. Haddow, Anders Götherström, Christopher J. KnĂŒsel, FĂŒsun Özer, Ian Hodder, Mehmet Somel
📚 Science
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Combining 131 paleogenomes with bioarchaeological and archaeological data, we studied social organization and gendered practices in ÇatalhöyĂŒk East Mound (7100 to 5950 BCE), a major Neolithic settlement in Central Anatolia. In early ÇatalhöyĂŒk, burials in the same building were frequently close genetic relatives, suggesting that houses were used by biological family members. In later periods, however, individuals buried in the same building were often genetically unrelated, despite sharing similar diets. We found no indication of sex-biased mobility into ÇatalhöyĂŒk. Meanwhile, in all periods, within-building genetic connections were predominantly maternal rather than paternal. Burials of female subadults also received a higher frequency of gifts than male subadults. Our results reveal how kinship practices changed while specific practices prioritizing female lines persisted for 1000 years at Neolithic ÇatalhöyĂŒk.
Opposing Backsliding Through Policy Competition: The Case of Poland’s Civic Platform (2015–2023) 45.3
Melis G. Laebens, Marcin ƚlarzyƄski
📚 Comparative Political Studies
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Democratic backsliding is often accompanied by popular policy innovations which boost the incumbent’s popularity, leaving opposition parties in a difficult electoral position. We analyze the strategies available to the opposition in such contexts through a theoretical discussion of issue-based competition and an exploratory case study of Poland’s main opposition party Civic Platform (PO) during eight years of democratic backsliding under United Right governments. Studying the changing positions of PO in three policy areas (abortion, social policy and national memory and identity), we outline how the opposition can re-position itself to attract votes. We argue that backsliding, because it produces a sense of urgency, incentivizes opposition parties to shift some of their policy positions either towards or away from the incumbent’s – even on issues that are central to their political identity. Because backsliding unleashes an existential conflict that strengthens partisan loyalties, opposition voters tolerate some changes that go against their preferences.
Mental Health and Religious Attendance: Does the Association Differ for Asian Americans? 45.1
Nunnally Zou, Heather Rackin, Samuel Stroope
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Attendance at religious services is a consistent predictor of positive mental health outcomes, though our findings suggest this may not hold for all racial-ethnic groups. Using data from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (N = 57,754), this study examines how the relationship between religious attendance and self-rated mental health varies across racial-ethnic groups in the United States, with a focus on Asian Americans. Findings reveal that religious attendance is significantly associated with better mental health for White, Black, and Hispanic Americans, but not for Asian Americans. The positive association is strongest for Blacks, followed by Whites and Hispanics, while Asians show no significant relationship. We suggest that the dual-minority status of religious Asian Americans (as religious minorities within their co-ethnic group, and ethnic minorities in their religious group) could potentially underlie this null association. Findings highlight the importance of considering racial-ethnic differences when studying the mental health benefits of religious participation.
We’ll stop having debates: how party organizations strategically invoke evidence 45.1
Sarah James
📚 Party Politics
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As the capacity to analyze data has mushroomed, invoking evidence to justify political opinions has gained popularity. How often do partisan organizations invoke evidence? How has this changed over time? I analyze the national party platforms from the two major American political parties since 1968 to assess when, how, and why the party organizations invoke evidence in their platforms. I introduce two categories for describing usage of evidence in partisan rhetoric: justification —citing evidence to corroborate the logic of existing ideological preferences—and solicitation —advertising interest in having more information to make a future policy decision. Using a novel dataset, I chart the frequency and style of how the two major parties invoke evidence in their platforms. I find stark partisan differences. While both parties primarily use solicitation—a finding that contradicts existing studies of individual political uses of knowledge—Republicans use justification at more than twice the rate of Democrats. I show this pattern accelerating after 1994. I argue that trends in how party organizations reference evidence reflect changes in values, goals, and policy commitments. Far from being neutral indicators of policy effectiveness, evidence is itself the product of and a tool for advancing a party’s agenda.
Dynamic Public Perceptions of and Media Influences on Military Threats to Taiwan: A Method Triangulation Approach 45.1
Chingching Chang, Yuan Hsiao, Ying-Ju Chiu
📚 Communication Research
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To understand dynamic public perceptions of the potential military threat posed by China among Taiwanese audiences, the current study considers daily military data, news coverage on major websites, and online forum discussions, along with public opinion surveys. Time-series data for 7 months, integrated into vector autoregression models, support tests of pathways involving (a) changes in factual data to salience in news coverage, (b) changes in news coverage to changes in public perception, (c) changes in public perception to salience in online forum discussions, and (d) reciprocal relationships between changes in news coverage and salience in online forum discussions. Further tests address how the patterns of influence might depend on Taiwan’s polarized political and media landscapes. The results support motivated agenda-setting effects (impact of news salience among willing believers) but reject selective (partisan media shape partisans’ war perceptions) and resonance (issues aligned with the media’s partisan slant shape war perceptions) explanations.
Noisy Politics, Quiet Technocrats: Strategic Silence by Central Banks 44.9
Benjamin Braun, Maximilian DĂŒsterhöft
📚 Regulation & Governance
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In contrast to the “quiet” politics of the pre‐2008 period, macroeconomic policy has become “noisy”. This break raises a question: How do independent agencies designed for quiet politics react when a contentious public turns the volume up on them? Central banks provide an interesting case because while they are self‐professed adherents to communicative transparency, individual case studies have documented their use of strategic silence as a defense mechanism against politicization. This paper provides a quantitative test of the theory that when faced with public contention on core monetary policy issues, central banks are likely to opt for strategic silence. We focus on the most contested of central bank policies: large‐scale asset purchase programs or “quantitative easing” (QE). We examine four topics associated with particularly contested side effects of QE: house prices, exchange rates, corporate debt, and climate change. We hypothesize that an active QE program makes a central bank less likely to address these topics in public. We further expect that the strength—and, in the case of the exchange rate, the direction—of this effect varies depending on the precise composition of asset purchases and on countries' growth models. Using panel regression analysis on a dataset of more than 11,000 speeches by 18 central banks, we find that as a group, central banks conducting QE programs exhibited strategic silence on house prices, exchange rates, and climate change. We also find support for three out of four country‐specific hypotheses. These results point to significant technocratic agency in the de‐ and re‐politicization of policy issues.
Democracies Not in Peril: Globalization and Tax Revenue 44.8
James E. Mahon
📚 PS: Political Science & Politics
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In a recent book, Bastiaens and Rudra (2018) claim that as governments embraced trade liberalization in the 1990’s, they experienced a revenue shock, and that democratic governments found it harder to repair the breach than did authoritarian ones. As a result, they argue, contemporary trade liberalizations have posed a danger to democracy by starving it for funds, forcing vulnerable governments to resort to politically unpopular policies. This is an important and provocative argument. However, good evidence contradicts its major premise. This research note critiques some data, presentation, and conceptual problems with the argument. It provides new analyses using the well-curated dataset from the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD, updated by UNU-WIDER), instead of the authors’ primary data from World Development Indicators . It shows that developing countries–and democracies especially–did not, in fact, suffer a revenue shock. On average, trade taxes constituted only a minor part of their government revenue. While the revenue they provided declined slightly over the period in question, this trend was overwhelmed by variation in other tax and non-tax revenues. As for total tax revenues, a key variable sometimes underemphasized in the book, ICTD data show that they expanded more rapidly in democratic developing countries than in non-democratic ones. Regression analyses with ICTD data also fail to confirm the authors’ finding of a revenue shortfall among developing democracies.
Tax havens and income inequality in host countries 44.8
Glen Biglaiser, Ibrahim Kocaman, Sebastian M Saiegh, Ronald McGauvran
📚 Socio-Economic Review
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The association between tax havens and income distribution in home states of multinational corporations has attracted much attention. However, studies have not empirically investigated whether there is also a relationship between low-tax jurisdictions and income inequality in host countries. Our findings, based on data from 152 countries spanning 1972–2020 and a range of econometric strategies, reveal a robust positive relationship between tax haven status and domestic income inequality, with tax havens associated with higher market-income (i.e. pretax and pretransfer) Gini indexes, and estimated postadoption Gini coefficients being larger by an average of 0.54 compared to what would be expected based on global trends, country characteristics, and observable economic factors. We also observe that compensatory tax policies, as well as the type of economic activities attracted by tax havens and their implications for labor markets, seem to mediate this relationship. Our results suggest that low-tax jurisdictions economically harm lower income groups in host countries.
Social network cognition among isolated villagers reveals distinct patterns of bias 44.5
📚 Nature Human Behaviour
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Tactics of survival: Strategies of Resistance Data Project update 44.5
Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, Ted Ellsworth, Harriet Goers, Michael Cowan, Oja Pathak, Ellin Chung
📚 Journal of Peace Research
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This article presents an update on the Strategies of Resistance Data Project. It extends the original coding of organizations seeking greater self-determination, including demands made by organizations, use of violent and nonviolent tactics and accommodations made to movements with a temporal range of 1960–2020. We elaborate on the update procedures, highlight trends in the data, and provide an application of the data to a number of hypotheses about organizational survival. The article explores tactics and organizational survival in a diverse set of contexts using data on both violent and nonviolent tactics. We find that employing a diversity of large-scale nonviolent tactics is associated with greater organizational survival, while accommodation by the state decreases the chance of survival.
Salary History and Employer Demand: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit 44.4
Amanda Y. Agan, Bo Cowgill, Laura K. Gee
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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We study how salary disclosures affect employer demand using a field experiment featuring hundreds of recruiters evaluating over 2,000 job applications. We randomize the presence of salary questions and the candidates' disclosures for male and female applicants. Our findings suggest that extra dollars disclosed yield higher salary offers, willingness to pay, and perceptions of outside options by recruiters (all similarly for men and women). Recruiters make negative inferences about the quality and bargaining positions of nondisclosing candidates, though they penalize silent women less. (JEL C93, D82, J22, J23, J31)
Introduction: Europe’s changing protest landscape 44.4
Sophia Hunger, Swen Hutter
📚 Journal of European Public Policy
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Voice at Work 44.3
Jarkko Harju, Simon JĂ€ger, Benjamin Schoefer
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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We estimate the effects of worker voice on productivity, job quality, and separations. We study the 1991 introduction of a right to worker representation on boards or advisory councils in Finnish firms with at least 150 employees, designed to facilitate workforce-management communication. Consistent with information-sharing theories, our difference-in-differences design reveals that worker voice raised labor productivity. In contrast to exit-voice theory, we find no effects on voluntary job separations. However, treated firms reduce involuntary separations (during our recessionary sample period). A 2008 introduction of shop-floor representation, another worker voice institution preexisting in our main firm sample, had more limited effects. (JEL E32, J24, J53, J63, M54)
Disentangling pandemic from George Floyd’s murder as the cause of the 2020 increase in violence 44.1
Tyler J Lane
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Background: There is considerable debate about whether the unprecedented rise in violence experienced across the United States in 2020 was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic or George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. This study aimed to add clarity by analysing violent crime data in Minneapolis. Methods: Interrupted time series on daily occurrences/counts of homicide, aggravated assault, domestic assault, sex offenses, detected gunfire, and 911 calls from 2019-2021 in Minneapolis. Models included logistic and quasi-Poisson regressions, adjusting for weekend, holidays, and maximum daily temperature. Results: Reported violent events did not increase during the pandemic, while incidence of sex offenses decreased 18% (95%CI: 0.71-0.93) and 911 calls by 3% (95%CI: 0.96-0.98). After Floyd’s murder, homicide increased 137% (95%CI: 1.10-5.11), aggravated assaults by 43% (95%CI: 1.23-1.66), sex offenses by 35% (95%CI: 1.05-1.74), and gunfire by 108% (95%CI: 1.81-2.40), while 911 calls decreased 5% (95%CI: 0.92-0.97). Conclusions: Floyd’s murder better explains the 2020 rise in violence. The immediate rise in gunfire after Floyd’s murder suggests a change in the willingness to use firearms already in possession rather than a sudden influx of them, while the drop in 911 calls aligns with the theory that the causative mechanism was community members disengaging from police to address crime and resolved disputes.
Travel as Adjunct Therapy for Major Depressive Disorder: ZMET Analysis of Positive Effects 43.8
Rui Cui, Haitao Zhai, Ruonan Wang, Shan Hua, Jun Zhang, Shuaishuai Li
đŸ”„ Preprint
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This study, leveraging positive psychology and ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique), explores travel experiences as an adjunct therapy for major depressive disorder outpatients. Analyzing cases with positive outcomes, the research identifies key therapeutic themes: sensory stimuli (particularly taste unique or spicy food, contrasting with visually-dominated sensory interventions), social interaction, exhaustion and catharsis (through controlled physical exertion, distincting from hedonic tourism experiences), and personal autonomy. These themes address existential needs, foster belonging, facilitate emotional release and regulation, and promote personal growth – ultimately enhancing connection, mastery, and self-regulation in individuals with major depressive disorder outpatients. The study uniquely highlights the therapeutic roles of sensory stimuli and exhaustion/catharsis, while confirming the importance of social interaction and autonomy. These findings support the potential of travel as a valuable adjunct therapy, offering novel pathways to positive psychological outcomes inmajor depressive disorder outpatients treatment.
Care Competition in the Family: Do Changes in Spousal Care Influence Grandchild Support? 43.7
INVEST Flagship, Hans HÀmÀlÀinen, Antti O Tanskanen, David Coall, Mirkka Danielsbacka
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Abstract Objective: This study examined whether changes in spousal care were associated with changes in grandchild care frequency among European grandparents. Background: Grandparents are important providers of childcare for their children's families, but they may face competing caregiving demands within the family, especially as spousal caregivers. Limited resources may force them to prioritize one family member over another, particularly when new care needs emerge. Method: This study used eight waves (2004–2022) of data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe, covering 19 countries. The sample included individuals aged 50+ who had participated in at least two study waves and had a grandchild under age 13 (56,383 observations from 18,754 respondents). Asymmetric fixed-effects regression was employed to examine whether starting or stopping spousal care was associated with changes in grandchild care frequency. Results: Starting intensive spousal care was associated with reduced grandchild care frequency, similarly for grandfathers and grandmothers. The results also indicated a negative effect of stopping spousal care on childcare, particularly among grandfathers, although this finding was not statistically significant. Further inspection revealed that stopping spousal care was associated with reduced grandchild care only among grandfathers who no longer resided with their partner (e.g., due to institutionalization or death). Conclusion: Engagement in intensive spousal care predicts grandparental childcare, showing that intensifying resource competition impacts the distribution of care within families.
Are catchall strategies bound to fail? The catchall conundrum and the case of a niche agrarian-class party 43.7
David Arter
📚 Party Politics
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When viewed as a response to long-term decline in a party’s core constituency – whether class, religion or language-based – catchall strategies involve the inherent risk of marginalising the party’s core voter without achieving significant and/or sustained electoral renewal. The risk of core shrinkage will not be offset by a durable electoral dividend and the catchall strategy may well feed the very decline it is designed to arrest. Whilst catchall strategies are not the exclusive preserve of any one type of party, the type of party may well affect the likelihood of achieving a catchall performance. Following Kirchheimer, parties based on a ‘specific professional category’s claims’, such as the Swedish Agrarians, cannot realistically aspire to a ‘successful transformation’. Accordingly, this paper considers whether the pursuit of a catchall strategy by an historic, niche agrarian-class party with exceptional regional strength in neighbouring Finland could hope to achieve a ‘catchall performance’. More widely it considers whether a catchall strategy is a realistic option in multiparty systems in which ‘new politics’ parties squeeze the available policy space and multi-dimensional cleavage structures cannot readily be accommodated within a single party.
Legislation Against the Odds: Overcoming Ideological Gridlock in EU Decision‐Making 43.7
Philipp Broniecki, Lukas Obholzer, Christine Reh
📚 Legislative Studies Quarterly
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Negotiations in bicameral settings face the risk of gridlock when veto players' preferences diverge on the ideological (left–right) dimension. In the European Union (EU), a high proportion of legislation appears gridlocked yet is nevertheless adopted. We argue that ideological gridlock is resolved through the supply of and trust in legislative concessions. These are made to uphold supranational cooperation, to use issue linkage, and under “permissive consensus” across EU member states. We test our argument using a new dataset on amendments and repeals of existing EU laws (1999–2015). Our results demonstrate that elites' preferences on supranational cooperation as well as the potential for issue linkage help explain legislative success despite gridlock. High public Euroskepticism decreases the likelihood of compromise because lawmakers fear domestic electoral backlash to EU‐level concessions. We contribute to established debates about legislative bargaining under complexity and propose that politicized cooperation can diminish problem‐solving capacity across federations, multi‐level states, and international organizations.
The asymmetrical negotiation of legal certainty: neutral places in taxation law in France 43.6
Corentin Durand, JĂ©rĂŽme PĂ©lisse
📚 Socio-Economic Review
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This article argues that face-to-face professional events where regulators and regulated parties engage in civil and scholarly conversations about the law, such as conferences, seminars, and training sessions, are central to how regulations are interpreted and applied—an understudied aspect of regulatory capture. Critically revisiting Bourdieu and Boltanski’s notion of neutral place, we reconceptualize these events as places where dominant agents of a particular field come together to agree on unifying rules of competition—in the case of tax law that of legal certainty. Using data from semi-structured interviews, as well as statistical analysis and event observations in the field of tax law in France, we show how the structure of these events and the interactions among experts, in a contested move, shift the burden of predictability onto tax regulators, by expecting them to stabilize rule interpretation to leave room for private actors’ strategic uses of the law.
AI assessment changes human behavior 43.5
Jonas Goergen, Emanuel de Bellis, Anne-Kathrin Klesse
📚 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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AI is increasingly replacing human decision-makers across domains. AI-based tools have become particularly common in assessment decisions, such as when recruiting employees or admitting students. Calls for transparency and new legislation require organizations to disclose the use of AI assessment tools, thus making people under assessment aware of its use. We investigate whether this shift from human to AI assessment affects people’s behavior during the assessment. We propose that people emphasize their analytical characteristics and downplay their intuitive and emotional ones under AI (vs. human) assessment, a phenomenon we label “the AI assessment effect.” Twelve studies (eight in text and four in the Supporting Information; N = 13,342) document the AI assessment effect and its underlying mechanism: the lay belief that AI prioritizes analytical characteristics in its assessment. Whereas prior work has studied perceptions of AI assessment tools and their productivity gains, the current research demonstrates systematic behavioral changes because of AI assessment. The findings offer theoretical contributions to the psychology of AI and practical insights for organizations using AI assessment.
Race in televised football: insights from behind-the-scenes within major English football media organizations 43.5
J. Van Sterkenburg, I. Blum, M. Fried, A. Van Lienden, S. Bradbury
✹ Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Multilevel policy textual learning in Chinese local environmental policies 43.4
Wenna Chen, Li Liao, Hongtao Yi
📚 Journal of Public Policy
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While existing research on policy diffusion has provided substantial evidence regarding the drivers of policy adoption across jurisdictions, limited attention has been given to the dynamics of policy textual learning across different levels of government. We fill this gap by using regression analysis to examine the patterns of policy textual learning evident in the clause similarity of seven environmental statutory policies in China. Within China’s decentralized and multilevel environmental governance, our findings reveal that horizontal policy textual learning is more prominent than vertical learning. Temporal distance negatively impacts policy textual learning, whereas spatial distance, contrary to traditional policy diffusion perspectives, does not universally explain multilevel policy textual learning. Additionally, subsequent versions of policy texts are not necessarily similar to earlier ones, challenging conventional assumptions about the adoption and adaptation of policies over time.
External pressure, bureaucratic politics and policy insiders: the policy shaping influence of internal coordination processes on European Commission Strategies 43.4
Sebastiaan Princen, Daniel Polman, Jeroen Candel, Robbert Biesbroek
📚 Journal of European Public Policy
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A house still divided: the 2024 election and the racial politics of congress 43.4
James Jones
✹ Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Beyond “platitudes of support or denouncement”: researching antiracism at a time of monsters 43.1
Alana Lentin
✹ Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Of Loving and Losing: The Influence of Dating App Motivations and Perceived Success on Psychological Well-Being 43.0
Anja Stevic, Angela Y. Lee, Sunny Xun Liu, Jeffrey Hancock
📚 Social Media + Society
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We advance communication theory on the relationship between online dating and psychological well-being with a nationally representative, two-wave panel survey of dating app users ( N = 521) that investigates individuals’ motives for dating and their perceived success. Results from an autoregressive structural equation model revealed people felt lonelier when they used dating apps for social approval, but not when they used them to pursue relationships. Perceived success was linked to psychological well-being: people felt lonely and less satisfied when they believed they were not attracting partners and better well-being when they felt successful. Gender differences were observed where women reported being more successful and less lonely but also more anxious about dating than men. However, men were observed to have higher life satisfaction when experiencing higher success. Our findings contribute evidence for the importance of motivations and perceptions in communication technology use and psychological well-being.
Solidarity in the European Union and the resilience of the state as a communicative frame 42.5
Jens Steffek, Inga GaiĆŸauskaitė, Björn Egner, Hubert Heinelt
📚 Journal of European Public Policy
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Generalizing Trimming Bounds for Endogenously Missing Outcome Data Using Random Forests 42.4
Cyrus Samii, Ye Wang, Junlong Aaron Zhou
📚 Political Analysis
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We present a method for narrowing nonparametric bounds on treatment effects by adjusting for potentially large numbers of covariates, using generalized random forests. In many experimental or quasi-experimental studies, outcomes of interest are only observed for subjects who select (or are selected) to engage in the activity generating the outcome. Outcome data are thus endogenously missing for units who do not engage, and random or conditionally random treatment assignment before such choices is insufficient to identify treatment effects. Nonparametric partial identification bounds address endogenous missingness without having to make disputable parametric assumptions. Basic bounding approaches often yield bounds that are wide and minimally informative. Our approach can tighten such bounds while permitting agnosticism about the data-generating process and honest inference. A simulation study and replication exercise demonstrate the benefits.
Grooming Authoritarianism: Anti-Trans/Queer Panic as Pedagogy for Democratic Decline 42.3
Aylon Cohen, Samuel R. Galloway
📚 PS: Political Science & Politics
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We address the anti-trans/queer panic integral to the ascendance of authoritarian politics in America and respond by calling on all political scientists to “queer” political science by undoing the cisheteronormativity of the discipline. We contend that this is not the special obligation of LGBTQ scholars but all political scientists. In this we follow Eve Sedgwick’s orientation away from a “minoritizing” to a “universalizing” epistemological perspective that situates this responsibility relative to resisting democratic decline.
Identity construction through talk of difference and similarity: blocking and threading analysis 42.1
Karoliina A Karppinen, Leena Mikkola, Malgorzata Lahti
📚 Journal of Communication
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Identity construction is a continuous process that permeates all social life. Drawing from intercultural communication scholarship and the Bakhtinian perspective on the construction of the self, we suggest that identity is constructed in talk through the interplay of socially constructed, ideologically imbued similarities and differences and propose the blocking and threading analysis (BTA) method to study this process. Blocking refers to constructing differences and social boundaries, whereas threading creates similarities, unity, and commonality. These practices are intertwined, and we argue that identity emerges from the constant shifts between the two. The four-step analytical process entails identifying positioning, recognizing connected utterances, interpreting blocking and threading, and examining their shifts. We illustrate the analytical force of BTA by an analysis of an extract from a focus group discussion among an interprofessional healthcare team. The method requires further application to different datasets, but it shows promise in terms of bringing new insights into research on identity construction.
Hi Mama! Daycare apps and the mediatization of parenting and care work 42.0
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Margaret Schwartz
📚 Media, Culture & Society
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Daycare management apps – marketed to care centers as a way to streamline operations and improve parent-caregiver communication – have quickly moved from relative obscurity in 2016 to near-omnipresence in center-based childcare. These apps mediate the work of caregiving and are thus a growing aspect of the nexus of cultural anxieties about how to manage reproductive labor, parenting, and gendered expectations of mothering. In this paper, we engage in a close reading of five major daycare apps in the US – Brightwheel, Lillio (formerly HiMama), My Bright Day, Procare, and Tadpoles – to investigate how they structure the experience and labor practices of both parenting and non-parent caregiving. As such, we read the app interfaces as material practices through which parents and caregivers grapple with the contradictions of the care crisis and contemporary conditions of parenting. Throughout this article, we attend to the ways that the technological imaginary unfolds in a specific site within the broader context of caregiving in the United States, ultimately arguing that these apps reflect and reaffirm caregiving practices that align with practices of so-called intensive or transcendent parenting.
Early insight into social network structure predicts climbing the social ladder 42.0
Isabella C. Aslarus, Jae-Young Son, Alice Xia, Oriel FeldmanHall
📚 Science Advances
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While occupying an influential position within one’s social network brings many advantages, it is unknown how certain individuals rise in social prominence. Leveraging a longitudinal dataset that tracks an entirely new network of college freshmen ( N  = 187), we test whether “climbing the social ladder” depends on knowing how other people are connected to each other. Those who ultimately come to occupy the most influential positions exhibit early and accurate representations of their network’s general, abstract structure (i.e., who belongs to which communities and cliques). In contrast, detailed, granular representations of specific friendships do not translate into gains in social influence over time. Only once the network stabilizes do the most influential individuals exhibit the most accurate representations of specific friendships. These findings reveal that those who climb the social ladder first detect their emerging network’s general structure and then fine-tune their knowledge about individual relationships between their peers as network dynamics settle.
A Model of Focusing in Political Choice 41.9
Salvatore Nunnari, Jan ZĂĄpal
📚 The Journal of Politics
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Owning the Simulacrum: Commodification, Intellectual Property, and the Collapse of Epistemic Sovereignty 41.9
Anurag Kadel
đŸ”„ Preprint
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This paper continues a reflexive Research Through Design (RTD) inquiry initiated in Simulation Without Ground and Seeds of Sovereignty, extending its scope from the epistemic disintegration within generative AI systems to their legal and economic codification. Using RTD as both method and critique, we treat intellectual property (IP) law and commodification not as neutral structures but as epistemic simulations—design artifacts that encode power, erase referents, and reify hallucination as value. Drawing on Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, Monett and Paquet’s critique of automated epistemologies, and emerging jurisprudence around AI authorship, we introduce the concept of juridical referentiality to describe how law increasingly mirrors the ungrounded patterns of generative systems. The law, like AI, now performs alignment—simulating authorship, creativity, and consent through recursive abstraction. Through a reflexive RTD lens, we interrogate these patterns and propose alternatives grounded in epistemic pluralism, regenerative authorship, and friction-led design. The paper culminates in a hybrid framework—bridging design and legal governance—that resists epistemic enclosure and restores referential integrity in a world governed by simulation.
Using OpenAI Models for Abstract Screening 41.7
Andrew Taylor, Josephine Usow, Eli Miller, Dilay Kalinoglu
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into tools that assist with systematic literature reviews, yet few empirical evaluations exist on their effectiveness for abstract screening—particularly within social science domains. This study evaluates the performance and cost of three OpenAI models (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4 Turbo, and GPT-4o Mini) in classifying relevance of abstracts in a real-world literature review on “net widening” and diversion programs in the criminal justice system. Using a batch inference pipeline, we tested models with both short and long prompt formats, assessing classification accuracy, precision, recall, and cost in 2024 USD. Our results show that while accuracy and recall were relatively high across all models (up to 90% accuracy and 95% recall), precision was lower—particularly for GPT-3.5 with long prompts—suggesting that while LLMs can support abstract screening, they are not yet a substitute for trained human reviewers in high-stakes systematic reviews. Notably, the low-cost GPT-4o Mini achieved near-parity in performance with GPT-4 Turbo, indicating promising potential for rapid, exploratory review workflows. This paper offers practical benchmarks, cost analyses, and recommendations for integrating LLMs into evidence review pipelines, emphasizing the need for thoughtful, transparent use of these tools in academic research.
Battles and Capitals 41.7
Shuhei Kitamura, Nils-Petter Lagerlöf
đŸ”„ Preprint
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The location of cities is linked to access to trade, but security also matters, in particular for capitals. Here we document this phenomenon, and explore its implications, in the context of Europe’s Great Power era. First we show that Great Power battles tend to occur in shortest-distance corridors between belligerent powers’ capitals, except where those corridors are intercepted by seas, mountains, and marshes. Then we show that capitals locate closer to each other when they have more of these types of geography between them. Finally, we show that city pairs are less likely to belong to the same state if they have more of this geography between them, allowing us to use geography to predict the territorial size and shape of Europe’s Great Powers. In sum, our results suggest that terrain which slows down military incursions makes capitals safer, allowing them to locate closer to each other; given all capitals’ locations, the surrounding geography then shapes the associated state territories.
How parties respond to protests in a changing political landscape 41.6
Jóhanna Ýr Bjarnadóttir
📚 Journal of European Public Policy
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#StopAsianHate in Australia: possibilities and paradoxes for local and global antiracism 41.6
Aaron Teo, Erin Wen-Ai Chew
✹ Ethnic and Racial Studies
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War and Responsibility 41.6
M. PATRICK HULME
📚 American Political Science Review
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Scholars and policymakers bemoan an imperial presidency in the war powers context, where the unilateral use of force is frequently interpreted as evidence of an unconstrained executive. Focusing on the strong blame avoidance incentives faced by politicians in the military intervention setting, I develop a model of the war powers focused on “Loss Responsibility Costs.” It suggests that presidents only risk full-scale war when they have the political cover provided by formal authorization, which forces lawmakers to share responsibility. Smaller interventions, in contrast, are frequently undertaken unilaterally because having the president act alone is consistent with congressional preferences for blame avoidance. Novel sentiment data based on tens of thousands of congressional speeches supports the claim that when the president acts unilaterally, they almost always act alongside lawmaker support, who favor intervention but avoid formally endorsing the endeavor. Altogether, it suggests legislators’ influence over war is stronger than commonly appreciated.
Less Hype, More Drama: Open-Ended Technological Inevitability in Journalistic Discourses About AI in the US, The Netherlands, and Brazil 41.4
JoĂŁo C. MagalhĂŁes, Rik Smit
📚 Digital Journalism
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Preferences, Selection, and the Structure of Teacher Pay 41.4
Andrew C. Johnston
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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I examine teacher preferences using a discrete-choice experiment linked to data on teacher effectiveness. I estimate willingness to pay for a rich set of compensation elements and working conditions. Highly effective teachers usually have the same preferences as their peers, but they have stronger preferences for performance pay. I use the preference estimates to investigate the optimal compensation structure for three key objectives: maximizing teacher utility, maximizing teacher retention, and maximizing student achievement. Under each objective, schools underutilize salary and performance pay while overutilizing retirement benefits. Restructuring compensation can significantly improve both teacher welfare and student achievement. (JEL H75, I21, J31, J32, J45, J81)
Beyond Formal Power: How Central Roles in Political Networks are Related to Media Visibility 41.3
Juho Vesa, Arttu MalkamÀki, Antti Gronow, Paul Wagner, Tuomas YlÀ-Anttila
📚 Communication Research
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A recurring finding in communication studies is that political actors with formal-institutional power are highly visible in the media. The relationship between informal power and media visibility remains less understood. This study examines whether central roles in networks of political collaboration—as indicators of informal power—are associated with increased visibility in mainstream news media. We hypothesize that organizations with central roles are more visible in the media because informal power increases their newsworthiness. Using social network methods and Bayesian regressions on survey and media data on organizations involved in climate policy in Finland, we find that central organizations with many collaboration partners receive more media coverage. Other central roles, such as brokerage or coalition leadership, are not associated with media visibility. This study advances knowledge of media visibility by showing that informal power is associated with media visibility, and that some power positions are more important than others.
High Stakes Every Day: Ritalin, Trust Cultures, and Relational Sovereignty in Philippine Academic Life with ADHD 41.2
Karl Patrick R. Mendoza
đŸ”„ Preprint
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This article offers a reflexive autoethnographic account of stimulant-reliant academic life in the Philippines, using daily Ritalin use to explore the institutional, ethical, and relational dynamics of functioning with ADHD in higher education. Mobilizing the notion of “high-stakes scaffolding,” it reflects on how stimulant use enables academic participation while exposing the demands of compliance and normative productivity. Anchored in five conceptual themes, the piece advances a situated ethics of neurodivergent survival—foregrounding care, ambivalence, and relational agency in navigating structurally ableist academic environments.
Twisted tongue: limits of China’s propaganda during crises and policy changes 41.1
Tony Zirui Yang, Hongshen Zhu
📚 Political Science Research and Methods
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Extensive research showcases that authoritarian propaganda can cultivate support and deter protest during “normal” times. This study examines authoritarian propaganda’s efficacy during crises and policy changes when the regime needs it most. We posit that various propaganda strategies, including “hard” and “soft” rhetoric, have significant limitations during crises. Hard propaganda’s heavy-handed slogans could signal regime strength but may also legitimize “rightful resistance” against local authorities, limiting its protest-deterrence effects. Soft propaganda may lose persuasiveness due to presenting contradictory arguments during policy changes. We leverage the turbulent period of China’s COVID policy reversal to conduct an original survey experiment in December 2022. Our findings reveal that pro-reopening hard propaganda weakens its protest-deterrence effects by reinforcing belief in protest righteousness. Moreover, inconsistent soft propaganda lowers public evaluations of China’s COVID response, diminishing its persuasive effects. Our study highlights significant limitations of authoritarian propaganda during crises and policy changes.
A norm about harvest division is maintained by a desire to follow tradition, not by social policing 40.9
Minhua Yan, Zhizhong Li, Yuanmei Li, Robert Boyd, Sarah Mathew
📚 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Determining how people behave in contexts governed by social norms can clarify both how norms influence human behavior and how norms evolve. We examined cooperative farming harvest division among the Derung, a Tibeto-Burman-speaking horticultural society in southwestern China. In the village of Dizhengdang, the norm dictates that cofarming harvests should be divided equally among participating households. This contrasts with an alternative norm followed in some other Derung villages that holds that harvests should be divided equally among participating laborers. Rational choice theory and evolutionary models of norm-based cooperation assume that individuals weigh the material and social payoffs of different actions and follow norms because doing so maximizes their payoff. However, the behavior of the Derung in Dizhengdang is not consistent with payoff maximization. Using interviews on co-farming behaviors and attitudes, along with an ultimatum game experiment framed as co-farming harvest division, we found that most respondents preferred divisions based on labor contribution. They also accurately guessed that others shared this preference and would approve of such divisions. Nonetheless, they still followed the prevailing norm of dividing by household. Their self-reported explanation for this behavior was that they desired to follow their traditional practices. Such a normative decision-making algorithm can allow individually consequential norms to persist without costly policing by other group members.
From educational conflicts to an educational cleavage? The multiple transformations of educational conflicts from medieval to post-industrial times 40.8
Julian L. Garritzmann
📚 West European Politics
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Financial Stress and Mental Health Among U.S. College Students: Gender Differences and Anxiety as a Mediator of Academic Disruption 40.7
Tania Akter
đŸ”„ Preprint
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This study examines gender differences in financial stress and anxiety among U.S. college students and evaluates whether financial stress predicts anxiety, and whether anxiety mediates the relationship between financial stress and academic disruption. Data from the 2023–2024 Healthy Minds Study, a nationally representative survey of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students in the United States, were analyzed. Survey-weighted regression models were used to assess gender differences and the association between financial stress and anxiety. A generalized structural equation model (GSEM) tested whether anxiety mediates the relationship between financial stress and academic disruption. Financial stress was modeled as a continuous predictor, anxiety as a continuous mediator, and academic disruption as an ordinal outcome. Female students reported significantly higher levels of financial stress and anxiety than male students, even after adjusting for age and race. Financial stress was positively associated with anxiety for both male and female students. This indicates a broad impact of financial pressure on emotional well-being. Anxiety subsequently predicted academic disruption. Mediation analysis revealed that anxiety significantly mediated the relationship between financial stress and academic disruption, and this explained more than half of the total effect. These findings highlight anxiety as a key psychological pathway through which financial stress affects academic functioning. Interventions targeting financial stress may improve both emotional well-being and academic performance, particularly for students facing elevated financial and psychological vulnerability.
A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis of co-offending characteristics 40.7
Ruslan Klymentiev, Dayle Harvey, Luis E. C. Rocha, Christophe Vandeviver
📚 Nature Human Behaviour
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In-kind government assistance and crowd-out of charitable services: Evidence from free school meals 40.5
Krista Ruffini, OrgĂŒl ÖztĂŒrk, Pelin PekgĂŒn
📚 Journal of Public Economics
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Information Systems, Service Delivery, and Corruption: Evidence From the Bangladesh Civil Service 40.5
Martin Mattsson
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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Slow public service delivery and corruption are common problems in low- and middle-income countries. Can better management information systems improve delivery speed? Does improving the delivery speed reduce corruption? In a large-scale experiment with the Bangladesh Civil Service, I send monthly scorecards measuring delays in service delivery to government officials and their supervisors. The scorecards increase on-time service delivery by 11 percent but do not reduce bribes. Instead, the scorecards increase bribes for high-performing bureaucrats. A model where bureaucrats' reputational concerns constrain bribes can explain the results. When positive performance feedback improves bureaucrats' reputations, the constraint is relaxed, and bribes increase. (JEL D73, D83, H83, O17)
Large language models show amplified cognitive biases in moral decision-making 40.4
Vanessa Cheung, Maximilian Maier, Falk Lieder
📚 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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As large language models (LLMs) become more widely used, people increasingly rely on them to make or advise on moral decisions. Some researchers even propose using LLMs as participants in psychology experiments. It is, therefore, important to understand how well LLMs make moral decisions and how they compare to humans. We investigated these questions by asking a range of LLMs to emulate or advise on people’s decisions in realistic moral dilemmas. In Study 1, we compared LLM responses to those of a representative U.S. sample ( N = 285) for 22 dilemmas, including both collective action problems that pitted self-interest against the greater good, and moral dilemmas that pitted utilitarian cost–benefit reasoning against deontological rules. In collective action problems, LLMs were more altruistic than participants. In moral dilemmas, LLMs exhibited stronger omission bias than participants: They usually endorsed inaction over action. In Study 2 ( N = 474, preregistered), we replicated this omission bias and documented an additional bias: Unlike humans, most LLMs were biased toward answering “no” in moral dilemmas, thus flipping their decision/advice depending on how the question is worded. In Study 3 ( N = 491, preregistered), we replicated these biases in LLMs using everyday moral dilemmas adapted from forum posts on Reddit. In Study 4, we investigated the sources of these biases by comparing models with and without fine-tuning, showing that they likely arise from fine-tuning models for chatbot applications. Our findings suggest that uncritical reliance on LLMs’ moral decisions and advice could amplify human biases and introduce potentially problematic biases.
Beyond Weber's Disenchantment: Artificial Intelligence and the Emergence of Technological Re-enchantment 40.3
Lucy Císaƙ Brown
đŸ”„ Preprint
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The aim of this paper is to theoretically reassess Weber’s concept of ‘disenchantment through rationalisation’, as primarily laid out in Science as a Vocation (1917) and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1946), to propose that recent technological advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) are repositioning humans into a state of ‘technological re-enchantment’. This process of re-enchantment acknowledges both the fundamentally dialectical nature of Weber's disenchantment and recognises that contemporary AI development has created systems whose operational logic exceeds human comprehension while remaining indispensable for achieving complex objectives. This paper therefore makes two theoretical contributions: first, it demonstrates that Weber's concept of rationalisation contains structural possibilities for re-enchantment that emerge through, rather than despite, formal rational processes; second, it argues that artificial intelligence represents the first empirical instantiation of this theoretical possibility, requiring us to reconceptualise the relationship between rationalisation and epistemic authority. 'Technological re-enchantment' here refers not to the return of pre-modern consciousness but to the emergence of structural epistemic dependence that operates through rational processes. Unlike traditional forms of authority based on tradition, charisma, or bureaucratic position, AI-mediated authority rests on demonstrated performance in contexts where explanatory understanding is structurally impossible. The concept will therefore be explored through three stages: first, examining the dialectical structure of Weber's disenchantment theory; second, analysing how AI's architecture creates unprecedented epistemic dependence; and finally, demonstrating how this represents re-enchantment through, rather than despite, rational processes.
Sharing is Caring (about Research): Three Avenues for Sharing (Protected) Text Collections and the Need for Non-Consumptive Research 40.3
Johannes B. Gruber, Atteveldt, W.H. van (Wouter)
đŸ”„ Preprint
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A decade ago, the computational turn in communication science was heralded by promises of unseen treasure troves of available digital text containing communication of politicians, journalists, social media users, and many other groups. As these treasures become more closely guarded today, the field needs to think of new strategies to continue to enable researchers who want to engage in computational communication research. One of these strategies is to make text data sharing a more common practice in the field -- which would also greatly enhance reproducibility of research. In this article, we outline three avenues to share as much of your data as possible, while still honouring ethical and legal restrictions. Given the relative lack of infrastructure for some of these avenues, we also highlight the capacities of the Amsterdam Content Analysis Toolkit (AmCAT) to enable non standard sharing strategies. We especially highlight the functions for *non-consumptive research* -- which means analyses methods that can be performed without access to the full data set.
Unraveling human crowd dynamics through the foot tracking of pedestrians 40.2
Yi Ma, Zhipan Niu, Meng Shi, Wei Xie, Zuoan Hu, Yidong Wei, Tian Zeng, Eric Wai Ming Lee
📚 Science Advances
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Movement of pedestrian crowds is ubiquitous in human society. However, it is unclear what dynamical regimes pedestrian crowds can exhibit at different crowd densities, how pedestrians move in these different dynamical regimes, and in which dynamical regime the movement synchronization of pedestrians is most likely to occur. Here, we conducted a unidirectional crowd movement experiment, in which we tracked the movement of pedestrian crowds through foot tracking. We find experimentally that pedestrian crowds can exhibit three distinct dynamical regimes (free regime, slow-moving regime, and jammed regime) depending on the crowd density. In the free regime, pedestrians’ movement is not constrained; in the slow-moving regime, pedestrians’ speed is constrained, but pedestrians’ movement direction in each step is not influenced; and in the jammed regime, both pedestrians’ speed and movement direction in each step are constrained. We also demonstrate that pedestrians are most likely to synchronize their movements spontaneously at the onset of jamming. Our findings provide important insights into crowd dynamics.
Monetary policy and the functional income distribution: Two million firms’ production dynamics 40.1
Lea Steininger, Jan P. Fritsche
📚 European Economic Review
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To burn a slum: Urban land conflicts and the use of arson against Favelas 39.9
Rafael Pucci
📚 Journal of Public Economics
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Managers, Professionals, or Public Servants? Organizational Professionals in the Public Sector as Hybrid Professionals 39.7
Linda Alamaa, Patrik Hall, Karl Löfgren
📚 Public Administration
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The expansion of organizational professionals in the public sector is often interpreted as a manifestation of increased managerial control and bureaucratisation, raising questions about shifting professional identities in public administration. This study contributes to research on hybrid professionalism and identity work by examining how organizational professionals themselves perceive this trend and how they justify their roles within public organizations. Based on a narrative analysis of interviews with 24 organizational professionals in Sweden, we examine how they construct their professional identity in relation to competing institutional logics. We expand the concept of hybrid professionalism by incorporating a public service logic alongside managerial and professional logics. We find that respondents frame their identity around the notion of performing a support function for frontline services. This positioning enables them to rearticulate managerial activities as supportive rather than controlling, thereby presenting their work as a response to bureaucratisation rather than a source of it.
Scholarly Communication in Sociology 39.7
Philip N. Cohen
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Scholarly publishing takes place in an institutional arena that is opaque to its practitioners. As readers, writers, reviewers, and editors, we have no clear view of the system within which we’re working. Researchers starting their careers receive (if they’re lucky) folk wisdom and mythology handed down from advisor to advisee, geared more toward individual success (or survival) than toward attaining a systemic perspective. They may learn how to get their work into the right journals or books, but often don’t learn why that is the outcome that matters for their careers, how the field arrived at that decision, and what the alternatives are – or should be. Gaining a wider perspective is important both for shaping individual careers and for confronting the systematic problems we face as a community of knowledge creators and purveyors. This primer starts from the premise that sociologists, especially those early in their careers, need to learn about the system of scholarly communication. And that sociology can help us toward that goal. Understanding the political economy of the system within which publication takes place is necessary for us to fulfill our roles as citizens of the research community, as people who play an active role in shaping the future of that system, consciously or not. Responsible citizenship requires learning about the institutional actors in the system and how they are governed, as well as who pays and who profits within the field, and who wins or loses.
Systemic Forgiveness: Why We Forgive Systems, Not People 39.7
Maijunxian Wang
đŸ”„ Preprint
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This paper introduces the concept of systemic forgiveness—a structural tendency to absolve systems, institutions, and algorithms from responsibility while punishing individuals. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks from political theory, sociology, and science and technology studies, the paper identifies three key mechanisms that enable this moral asymmetry: the complexity shield, attribution bias, and de-agentified narratives. Through case studies in finance, healthcare, algorithmic governance, and infrastructure, it demonstrates how systemic actors evade accountability via abstraction, opacity, and narrative displacement, while frontline workers become scapegoats. The genealogy of this phenomenon is traced from bureaucratic hierarchies to algorithmic impunity, revealing how moral responsibility has been reframed as technical failure. The paper concludes by proposing a framework for symmetrical accountability—introducing legal personhood for systems, auditable responsibility chains, reparative indexing, and epistemologically accountable design. Ultimately, it argues that systemic forgiveness is not an ethical oversight but a political logic that must be challenged in pursuit of structural justice.
Food Transfers and Child Nutrition: Evidence from India's Public Distribution System † 39.6
Aditya Shrinivas, Kathy Baylis, Benjamin Crost
📚 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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India's National Food Security Act of 2013 (NFSA) led to one of the biggest expansions in food transfers in history, affecting over 500 million people. We use plausibly exogenous variation created by the NFSA to estimate the effect of food transfers on child nutrition. Using individual panel data across eight states in India over five years, we find that increased transfers significantly reduced stunting. The food transfers increased wage incomes and improved dietary diversity. Our results suggest that, in the states we study, the NFSA prevented approximately 1.8 million children from being stunted (JEL I12, I18, I38, J13, O12)
“It’s like a disconnection” – political skepticism among poor and working-class black and Latine people 39.5
Daniel Laurison, Rachel Broun, Kelly Diaz, Claudia Alegre, Lydia Orr, Ankit Rastogi, Elizabeth Zack
✹ Ethnic and Racial Studies
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A new approach to teaching social class: Introducing the Edinburgh Open-Source Class Calculator 39.4
Scott Oatley, Tod Van Gunten
đŸ”„ Preprint
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This paper introduces a digital tool for teaching social class concepts in introductory sociology, social stratification and social theory courses. The Edinburgh Open-Source Class Calculator is an interactive web application providing a hands-on approach for class learning and engagement around the concept of social class. To maintain transparency, reproducibility, adaptability and robustness, we developed this application with widely used software (the R software environment) and make source code freely available under a Creative Commons license. Students can use the application to explore the elements of different conceptualisations of social class, such as employment situation, workplace authority, and cultural consumption. The calculator encompasses Marxian, Weberian, and Bourdieusian class concepts and includes five distinct social class operationalisations, and two alternative operationalisations based upon similar theoretical orientations. As a result, students are able to better understand distinct conceptualizations and operationalizations of class. Application available here: https://eosscc.shinyapps.io/Edinburgh_Class_Calculator/.
Asymmetric autonomy: pension fund investing between members and markets 39.3
Philipp Golka, Natascha van der Zwan
📚 Socio-Economic Review
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Pension funds occupy a special position in the financial system: their long-term investment orientation and social outlook have led to calls for pension investment for purposes beyond the provision of retirement income. Scholars of financialization have questioned the possibilities to mobilize pension assets for other (e.g. social or environmental) goals by pointing to the constraining power of financial intermediaries. This article explores potential constraints on pension fund investments through an empirical case study of pension funds in the Netherlands. We show that pension funds’ position between members and financial intermediaries restricts their capacity to act as autonomous investors, albeit in asymmetric ways. Although pension fund boards are required to consider member preferences, knowledge deficits and organizational distance enable them to carve out discretionary space. However, due to regulatory requirements, their autonomy vis-à-vis financial intermediaries is more limited. We illustrate our findings with regards to pension funds’ adoption of sustainable investment.
Just climate experimentation: Distributive, procedural, and recognition justice in two low-carbon pilots in China 39.0
Yiqun Yang, Kevin Lo
📚 Political Geography
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Decentralized Science Artificial Intelligence (DeSci AI): Barriers and Opportunities for Mass Adoption by the Scientific Community 38.8
Maryam Jessri, Tiffany Tavares, Andrew Hemingway, Hannah Janjua-Schick, Ahmed Sultan
đŸ”„ Preprint
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The emergence of decentralized science (DeSci) and the potential for its acceleration through artificial intelligence (AI) presents both remarkable promise and formidable challenges for modern research. DeSci AI platforms use blockchain-based, openly governed workflows and autonomous AI “swarms” capable of literature synthesis, peer-review triage, and reputation tracking to democratize access, speed discovery, and rebuild public trust. Yet, they also introduce complex implementation barriers and governance questions. The transformative claims of DeSci must be gauged against the benchmark of conventional science. Traditional research practice is anchored in methodological rigor through hypothesis-driven design, validated instrumentation, standard operating protocols, and independent peer review. Stable institutional arrangements such as universities, funding councils, and archival journals further buttress reliability by providing clear governance and normative oversight. Nevertheless, the contemporary academic reward economy, in which publication is highly valued, and grant income constitute the currency of promotion, often favors projects with near-certain, publishable outcomes. This frequently suppresses genuine curiosity, leaving potentially transformative inquiries chronically underexplored. The scientific community must therefore embrace decentralized, data-secure alternatives while preserving valuable institutional frameworks. Successful adoption of DeSci-AI hinges on interrelated technical, cultural, regulatory, and resource-related challenges. This perspective maps those barriers and proposes integrated strategies including token-backed reviewer remuneration, incentive pools for negative or replication studies, AI-driven misconduct auditors, and hybrid governance pilots, to chart a realistic pathway for the scientific community to leverage DeSci AI synergies while safeguarding rigor, equity, and societal trust.
Bespoke science: the use of ad hoc scientific advisory committees in the Covid-19 pandemic 38.6
Roger Koppl, Kira Pronin, Nick Cowen, Marta Podemska-Mikluch, Pablo Paniagua
📚 Public Choice
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Many governments formed ad hoc scientific advisory committees in the Covid-19 pandemic because they offered the government greater control over policy advice than standing agencies. The difference between ad hoc and standing advisory bodies has been little noted in the literature. High-uncertainty crises demanding expertise and requiring action from the national government increase the value of policy discretion, raising the value of controlling the scientific narrative. An ad hoc body is generally easier to control than a standing body because policymakers have greater liberty to choose its members, specify its mandate, and disband and reconstitute it when needed. Control generally requires either a narrow membership or a narrow mandate. If members cannot be chosen to be reliably aligned with the government or its policy preferences, a narrow mandate will restrain the committee from offering undesired advice or analysis. Our argument builds on the public choice assumption of motivational symmetry: The choices of scientists and politicians are shaped by the same motives and desires that influence individuals in any other sphere of life. Our case studies of Italy, UK, US, Poland, Uganda, and Sweden support our theory.
The Values of Fame: Exploring the Visual and Textual Representations of Basic Values in Influencers’ Instagram Content 38.5
AnaĂ«lle J. Gonzalez, Isra Irmak AkgĂŒn, Laura Vandenbosch
📚 Social Media + Society
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Despite the popularity of social media influencers (SMIs), little is known about how their content reflects and conveys certain values, leaving a gap in understanding their role as value intermediaries. This content analysis examined the representation of Schwartz values in the Instagram profiles of 59 of the most followed Western SMIs, celebrities, and athletes. Relying on 1256 posts and 2936 stories, the study documented the prevalence of values, modalities of representations (multimodal complexity and post-caption congruence), and differences between SMIs, athletes, and celebrities. Results revealed that 60.3% of the content portrayed at least one value, with achievement, benevolence, and hedonism being the most frequent. Multilevel analyses indicated that SMIs and athletes were more likely to post hedonism and benevolence, while celebrities were more likely to share universalism than SMIs. Most values were represented through low to medium levels of multimodal complexity, and only 15.3% showed post-caption congruence. These findings underscore the need to document how global digital platforms and actors mediate value representation, as they have the potential to shape audience values and cultural norms.
Who Needs a Theory of Justice? Judith Shklar and the Politics of Injustice 38.4
ROBIN DOUGLASS
📚 American Political Science Review
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Much recent political theory aims to move beyond the dominant approach to theorizing justice by foregrounding cases of injustice. Judith Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice is regularly invoked in this context, yet the full force of her challenge to the “normal model of justice” and its implications for understanding injustice have not been fully appreciated. This article reconstructs and defends Shklar’s approach to theorizing injustice. It evaluates the differences between John Rawls’s account of the sense of justice and Shklar’s notion of the sense of injustice, showing why the latter should be theorized in relation to plural, competing, and ever-changing expectations, rather than in relation to ideal principles of justice. It illustrates how we can evaluate political responses to injustice without recourse to such principles and maintains that doing so is a strength of any democratic theory that is committed to giving injustice its due.
Managing unwanted visibility: how transnational Korean women content creators experience and manage harmful algorithmic visibility on global social media 38.4
Jeehyun Jenny Lee
📚 Information, Communication & Society
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The Anatomy of India’s Industrial Interdependencies: 7-Digit Product-Level Supply-Use and Input-Output Tables from ASI Data (2016-2022) with a Case Study of the Mobile Phone Sector 38.4
Sourish Dutta
đŸ”„ Preprint
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This paper outlines the construction of high-resolution, 7-digit product-level Supply-Use Tables (SUTs) and symmetric Input-Output Tables (IOTs) for the Indian economy, leveraging microdata from the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) for the period 2016-2022. We delineate a robust methodology encompassing the generation of detailed input and output flows, with a particular focus on the reconciliation of data from registered and unregistered manufacturing sectors through a meticulously developed NPCMS-NIC concordance. The critical transformation from the often-rectangular SUTs to square, symmetric product-by-product IOTs is explicated using the Industry Technology Assumption, a choice justified by its suitability for handling by-products prevalent in a diverse manufacturing landscape. The analytical prowess of this newly constructed high-resolution IOT framework is then demonstrated through its application to assess key economic impacts, specifically the Domestic Value Added (DVA) generated and the employment supported by production and export activities. A detailed case study of India’s rapidly evolving mobile phone manufacturing sector (NPCMS 4722200) for the 2016-2022 period reveals profound structural shifts: significant output growth coupled with notable import substitution, a remarkable surge in exports, and a dynamic evolution in the DVA versus Foreign Value Added (FVA) shares, particularly in export-oriented production. The analysis further uncovers substantial employment growth, albeit with an increasing reliance on contractual labour and a heartening rise in female participation in the workforce. These meticulously constructed tables represent a significant methodological advancement and provide an invaluable empirical resource for nuanced analysis of sectoral interdependencies, the efficacy of industrial policy, and the complex dynamics of India’s engagement with global value chains.
A Revolution in Revolutionary Theory? 38.2
Benjamin Abrams
📚 Comparative Politics
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Recently, the field of revolutionary theory has seen a flourishing of novel scholarly efforts that constitute a genuine regeneration of how we conceive of, investigate, and interpret revolutions. The first elements of this regeneration of revolutionary theory have now found their way to print, and the scene is set for a prospective revolution in our field. This article surveys the history of revolutionary theory since 1883, establishes the scope and contribution of the field’s present rejuvenation, and charts the place of these developments in the field’s broader path, before closing by exploring what may be in store for students of revolution in the future. In doing so, the article draws attention to three areas of current rejuvenation: latent patterns of revolution; long revolutionary outcomes; and revolutionary ideas. Moreover, it proposes three areas for fruitful new research: revolutionary programs, revolutions as political systems, and the dynamics occurring within “the fog of revolution.”
From Codebooks to Promptbooks: Extracting Information from Text with Generative Large Language Models 38.0
Oscar Stuhler, Cat Dang Ton, Etienne Ollion
📚 Sociological Methods & Research
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Generative AI (GenAI) is quickly becoming a valuable tool for sociological research. Already, sociologists employ GenAI for tasks like classifying text and simulating human agents. We point to another major use case: the extraction of structured information from unstructured text. Information Extraction (IE) is an established branch of Natural Language Processing, but leveraging the affordances of this paradigm has thus far required familiarity with specialized models. GenAI changes this by allowing researchers to define their own IE tasks and execute them via targeted prompts. This article explores the potential of open-source large language models for IE by extracting and encoding biographical information (e.g., age, occupation, origin) from a corpus of newspaper obituaries. As we proceed, we discuss how sociologists can develop and evaluate prompt architectures for such tasks, turning codebooks into “promptbooks.” We also evaluate models of different sizes and prompting techniques. Our analysis showcases the potential of GenAI as a flexible and accessible tool for IE while also underscoring risks like non-random error patterns that can bias downstream analyses.
The rural consolidation state. A critical examination of municipal consolidation strategies in Bavaria (Germany) 38.0
Andreas Kallert, Simon Dudek
📚 Political Geography
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Institutions of public judgment established by social contract and taxation 37.9
Taylor A. Kessinger, Joshua B. Plotkin
📚 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Indirect reciprocity is a compelling explanation for stable cooperation in a large society: Those who cooperate appropriately earn a good standing, so that others are more likely to cooperate with them. However, this mechanism requires a population to agree on who has good standing and who has bad standing. Consensus can be provided by a central institution that monitors and broadcasts reputations. But how might such an institution be maintained, and how can a population ensure that it is effective and incorruptible? Here, we explore a simple mechanism to sustain an institution for judging reputations: a tax collected from each member of the population. We analyze the possible tax rate that individuals will rationally pay to sustain an institution of judgment, which provides a public good in the form of information, and we derive necessary conditions for individuals to resist the temptation to evade their tax payment. We also consider the possibility that institution members may be corrupt and subject to bribery, and we analyze how strong the incentives against corruption need to be. Our analysis has implications for establishing robust public institutions that provide social information to support cooperation in large populations—and the potential negative consequences associated with wealth or income inequality.
Cultural tendencies in generative AI 37.8
Jackson G. Lu, Lesley Luyang Song, Lu Doris Zhang
📚 Nature Human Behaviour
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The “hacking” of a mixed electoral system: a case study of Hungary 37.7
Fanni TanĂĄcs-MandĂĄk, Attila HorvĂĄth
📚 Public Choice
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Following Hungary’s 2010 parliamentary election, the Fidesz–KDNP government, as part of a comprehensive restructuring of the country’s constitutional system, fundamentally modified the electoral system approved in 1989, maintaining the mixed system but introducing a number of significant changes to it. The paper seeks to provide a comparative analysis of the 1989 and 2011 electoral systems, with particular focus on how the ruling parties have adapted the new system to their own advantage. Our study aims to shed light on how an electoral system can be susceptible to manipulation through the application of political reasoning that may appear neutral and “well-intentioned”. Despite retaining the mixed-system framework, the changes resulted in a stable advantage for a single political force.
The artisanal imaginaries of contemporary production 37.5
Michelle Phillipov, Susan Luckman, Lyn McGaurr
📚 Journal of Communication
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Ideas of “craft” and “craftsmanship” have long been mobilized in middle-class Global North markets to promote the romanticized authenticity of artisanal goods, but what happens when these ideas are applied to industrially-made products? This article analyzes the artisanal imaginaries of the Australian Made Campaign to explore how the campaign taps into the growing cultural desirability of the handmade and the artisanal, and heightened concerns about the future sustainability of mass production. Focusing on the discursive and aesthetic approach of the campaign’s Facebook posts, we show how the campaign contributes to a wider mainstreaming of neo-craft as a dominant mode for promoting production in a national context where onshore manufacturing has long been in decline. We argue that the campaign’s media repertoires work to “domesticate” large-scale manufacturing via emotive appeals to traditional artisanal tropes (“love,” “family,” “care”) to tap into the zeitgeist appeal of locally-specific and knowable scales of production.
Hype, financial narratives, and self-fulfilling prophecies in surveillance capitalism 37.4
Petter Törnberg
📚 Media, Culture & Society
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The rise of platforms has transformed our understanding of contemporary capitalism, with the critical literature describing how these firms leverage unprecedented digital powers to extract monopoly rents – perhaps even heralding a new form of Feudalism. This paper draws on the literature on financial narratives to examine the role that such stories play within the form of capitalism that they describe, and what this suggests for the role of “hype” in contemporary capitalism. The same stories that for critical scholars appear as menacing threats of “technofeudalism” or “surveillance capitalism” for investors appear as optimistic stories of promising future returns. By driving financial investments, narratives afford platforms very real social and political powers, enabling them to function as a form of self-fulfilling prophecies. The paper argues for a cultural inflection to the political economy of Big Tech – viewing capitalism as neither mechanistic nor rational, but as an expression of a complex interplay between narrative, technology, and economic power. This suggests the need for a critical hype studies , geared at deconstructing the narratives undergirding the technological waves of capitalist pursuits, and examining the broader role of hype in coordinating and directing flows of capital within contemporary financialized capitalism.
The Development of an Issue Public: Evidence from The Eras Tour 37.4
Erin Leigh Rossiter, Jeffrey Harden
📚 The Journal of Politics
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Arts, cultural engagement and health inequalities. Critical reflections on the UK Creative Health Review (2023) 37.3
Stephen Clift, J. Matt McCrary, Mette Kaasgaard, Gunter Kreutz, George Musgrave, Andrew Danso, Joshua S. Bamford, Matthew Pelowski, Christina Davies, Eva Schurig
đŸ”„ Preprint
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The Creative Health Review (CHR) published in 2023 is an advocacy document by the UK National Centre for Creative Health and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing. The CHR defines creative health activities as visual and performing arts, crafts, film, literature, cooking, gardening, and visits to cultural centres and heritage sites and claims that active promotion of such activities in socially disadvantaged communities and among marginalised groups can mitigate health inequalities. The report relies on case studies and testimonies of lived experiences as primary sources of evidence. Our critical reflections on methods and content show that the CHR is insufficient to substantiate its claims. Instead, it fails to acknowledge the need to adhere to established frameworks of critical appraisal and evidence synthesis. In conclusion, the CHR does not provide a foundation for evidence-based public health policies and practice to address health inequalities through culture and the arts.
Wounds That Still Bleed: A Black Bioethical and Historical Approach to The Black Maternal Crisis 37.1
AMALIA ALI
đŸ”„ Preprint
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In the United States, Black women are dying at alarming rates compared to their white counterparts, during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. Public health researchers and practitioners are attempting to close this disparity gap and improve maternal health outcomes for Black women. This paper will examine the Black maternal crisis in the context of the United States, following a bioethical framework, Black Bioethics, that interrogates the racialized encounters with the US healthcare system and acknowledges the unique experiences of Black women as they navigate this system. I argue that the Black maternal crisis is a continuation of racial logics that emerged in the epoch of American Slavery and persists in contemporary obstetrics in the form of medicalization. Established as a medical specialty in the 19th century, obstetrics and gynecology inherited the practices that marked the reproductive capacities of enslaved Black women as inherently different and justified experimentation and interventions that produced fatal outcomes for the mother and child. Black bioethics provides a framework for interrogating this history and engaging with the narratives of Black mothers as a basis for humanizing maternal care that has shown promising results in mitigating the Black maternal crisis. Drawing on interviews with researchers, professionals, and Black women, from the practicum experience, the paper outlines alternative models of care that are inspired by the narratives of resistance and proposes an education-based framework to address gaps in professional understandings. It is the aim of this paper to introduce an ethical framework that bridges history, public health research, and current initiatives to understand the impact of medicalization on the Black maternal crisis.
A Global Ranking of Research Productivity of Political Science Departments – CORRIGENDUM 36.9
Joan BarcelĂł, Christopher Paik, Peter van der Windt, Haoyu Zhai
📚 PS: Political Science & Politics
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Perspective Getting and Cross-Party Support for Electoral Fairness 36.8
Ryan Strickler
📚 Political Behavior
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Plastic bag bans and fees reduce harmful bag litter on shorelines 36.8
Anna Papp, Kimberly L. Oremus
📚 Science
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Plastic pollution threatens marine and freshwater ecosystems and the services they provide. Although plastic bag bans and taxes are increasingly implemented worldwide, their effectiveness in reducing plastic litter remains unknown. Leveraging the patchwork of bag policies across different geographic scales in the United States and citizen science data on 45,067 shoreline cleanups, we assess the impact of these policies on plastic bag litter. We find that plastic bag policies lead to a 25 to 47% decrease in plastic bags as a share of total items collected at cleanups relative to areas without policies, with taxes possibly further reducing shoreline litter. At a time when many jurisdictions are considering bag policies, while others are preemptively prohibiting them, our study provides evidence that they mitigate shoreline plastic pollution.
Optimal housing taxation with land scarcity and maintenance: A Mirrleesian perspective 36.8
Spencer Bastani, Sören Blomquist, Firouz Gahvari, Luca Micheletto, Khayyam Tayibov
📚 European Economic Review
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Can the Communication Style of Social Media Videos Affect Listening Quality and Opinion Change? 36.7
Edana Beauvais, Dietlind Stolle
📚 Political Communication
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Confederate reckoning and resignifying racism in Brazil: local memory politics and anti-racist movement strategies 36.5
Katherine Jensen
✹ Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Voting alone: Early voting and turnout in couples 36.4
Johannes Bergh, Dag Arne Christensen, Henning Finseraas
📚 Electoral Studies
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The making of a hydrofrontier: geopolitics, securitization and ‘green’ energy imaginaries in India's eastern borderlands 36.1
Michelle Irengbam, Christopher Sneddon
📚 Political Geography
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Urban entrepreneurialism under network narrative: local government inter-city investment logics in China 36.1
Chengyan Pu, Yonghua Zou
📚 Public Management Review
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How United Nations peace operations can help overcome perils to post-conflict elections 35.9
BarÄ±ĆŸ Arı, Theodora-Ismene Gizelis, Wakako Maekawa
📚 Journal of Peace Research
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Agreeing to elections is generally seen as a key way to settle armed conflict and prevent recurrent violence. However, the transition from violent conflict to nonviolent electoral competition can be fraught with many challenges. Stable electoral competition requires trust in institutions, but trust often takes a long time to develop and is often lacking in post-conflict elections. We argue that UN peacebuilding operations can play an indispensable role in the development of stable electoral institutions through three interrelated ways: reducing political and electoral violence, supporting democratic attitudes and norms of peaceful coexistence, and reinforcing institutional capacity and the rule of law. Using a new measure of the expected quality of elections in post-conflict countries between 1946 and 2012, we show that UN peace missions are associated with better elections and a greater likelihood of successful transitions to electoral competition compared to post-conflict countries without UN involvement. We also find larger differences when the UN is involved in establishing electoral institutions, especially when there is no or limited prior electoral competition, indicating that the UN is effective at assisting the democratization processes in difficult contexts.
Detecting pro-kremlin disinformation using large language models 35.7
Marianne Kramer, Yevgeniy Golovchenko, Frederik Hjorth
📚 Research & Politics
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A growing body of literature examines manipulative information by detecting political mis-/disinformation in text data. This line of research typically involves highly costly manual annotation of text for manual content analysis, and/or training and validating automated downstream approaches. We examine whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can detect pro-Kremlin disinformation about the war in Ukraine, focusing on the case of the downing of the civilian flight MH17. We benchmark methods using a large set of tweets labeled by expert annotators. We show that both open and closed LLMs can accurately detect pro-Kremlin disinformation tweets, outperforming both a research assistant and supervised models used in earlier research and at drastically lower cost compared to either research assistants or crowd workers. Our findings contribute to the literature on mis/-disinformation by showcasing how LLMs can substantially lower the costs of detection even when the labeling requires complex, context-specific knowledge about a given case.
PAPEA: A modular pipeline for the automation of protest event analysis 35.5
Sebastian Haunss, Priska Daphi, Jan Matti Dollbaum, Lidiya Hristova, PĂĄl SusĂĄnszky, Elias Steinhilper
📚 Political Science Research and Methods
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Protest event analysis (PEA) is the core method to understand spatial patterns and temporal dynamics of protest. We show how Large Language Models (LLM) can be used to automate the classification of protest events and of political event data more broadly with levels of accuracy comparable to humans, while reducing necessary annotation time by several orders of magnitude. We propose a modular pipeline for the automation of PEA (PAPEA) based on fine-tuned LLMs and provide publicly available models and tools which can be easily adapted and extended. PAPEA enables getting from newspaper articles to PEA datasets with high levels of precision without human intervention. A use case based on a large German news-corpus illustrates the potential of PAPEA.
Treated by the Treaty? How the expansion of co-decision affected the volume and complexity of EU legislation 35.4
Steffen Hurka
📚 Journal of European Public Policy
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Cobb-Douglas models interpreted by Biology: from Kleiber’s Law to thermodynamic foundations of production 35.1
Aléaume MULLER
đŸ”„ Preprint
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The so-called Cobb–Douglas production function offers a synthetic mathematical formalization of economic activity. Focused primarily on capital and labor, it systematically overlooks the role of natural resources and the environment—an omission that has made it the target of recurring criticism. To examine the validity of these critiques, this article proposes a parallel with Kleiber’s law in biology, which links an organism’s energy consumption to its body mass through the notion of basal metabolic rate. We demonstrate that this analogy opens the way for a reinterpretation of both the Cobb–Douglas function and the Solow model, enabling a perspective that is not only compatible with but also complementary to ecological economics. Moreover, it reveals a deeper homology: in both cases, the functions describe the behavior of dissipative thermodynamic systems, which organize energy flows to sustain their structural integrity. This framework allows for a physical reading of economic production mechanisms—not as abstract aggregates, but as expressions of a universal process of self-organization driven by flows of matter and energy. It enables the integration of thermodynamic constraints into the core of economic theory, in continuity with existing literature, while paving the way for an understanding of the economy as a physically evolving system
How commercial video games engage with biodiversity and conservation: a systematic map of literature 35.1
Katie Blake, Ugo Arbieu, Sofia CastellĂł y Tickell, Adam Gleave, Paul J Johnson, Takahiro KUBO, Sandra Lai, Kota MAMENO, Silvio Marchini, Claire Petros
đŸ”„ Preprint
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Mass media is widely used to engage audiences with the natural world. Given their extensive reach and attention to ecological topics, there has been growing interest in using commercial video games for conservation outreach. However, there has not yet been a holistic overview of work on this topic. We produced the first systematic map on how commercial video games engage with biodiversity and conservation. This includes 380 papers, covering five languages as well as both empirical (34.7%) and non-empirical (65.3%) literature. Our manuscript is complemented by a freely accessible and fully interactive online database. Users can further explore our findings and interrogate the available evidence according to their own interests. Overall, the field is even more diverse and multidisciplinary than expected: 450 different games have been studied, and a variety of ways to depict or engage with real-world ecology have been scrutinised. Ecocriticism dominates non-empirical work – often evaluating the extent that game design encourages or condemns exploitation of nature. Empirical papers are overwhelmingly non-experimental (93.7%); research has most often explored how video games represent real-world wildlife, influence players’ ecological perceptions, or inform players’ interactions with virtual nature. Despite the volume of literature, there are glaring omissions. Few studies employed pre/post-test assessments or even control groups, therefore making it difficult to infer the causal effects of video games. Most notably, there is not yet evidence on whether games make players more or less likely to take real-world pro-ecological action. Video games clearly have the potential to represent biodiversity and convey ecological messages – whether these be helpful or harmful for conservation. However, only by taking more rigorous approaches can we better understand the impact of games for this purpose. Our map highlights several promising areas for future study. As examples, we strongly recommend that researchers consider the role of player differences on the impact of games, observe actual behaviours and how these change after play, and pursue interdisciplinary collaborations with the games industry for more thorough, applicable, and novel findings.
The Social Construction of Mental Health Facts in Social Media Language 35.0
Jessica S. Robles
📚 Social Media + Society
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Social media has had a significant impact on the increasing visibility of mental health. This article draws on a digital ethnographic approach and discourse analysis of posts to the microblogging site X (formerly Twitter) to examine uses of and metacommunication about the language of mental health. The analysis traces and snapshots how mental health language is being used to construct mental health, mental illness, and related subjects as a meaningful social object by participants on social media. The results focus on a particular practice around contesting the language and meaning of mental health designations, identities and language as a form of communication ritual that produces normative metadiscourse about mental health, what it means, and how we should understand and talk about it.
Generative AI without guardrails can harm learning: Evidence from high school mathematics 34.8
Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani, Alp Sungu, Haosen Ge, Özge Kabakcı, Rei Mariman
📚 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Generative AI is poised to revolutionize how humans work, and has already demonstrated promise in significantly improving human productivity. A key question is how generative AI affects learning—namely, how humans acquire new skills as they perform tasks. Learning is critical to long-term productivity, especially since generative AI is fallible and users must check its outputs. We study this question via a field experiment where we provide nearly a thousand high school math students with access to generative AI tutors. To understand the differential impact of tool design on learning, we deploy two generative AI tutors: one that mimics a standard ChatGPT interface (“GPT Base”) and one with prompts designed to safeguard learning (“GPT Tutor”). Consistent with prior work, our results show that having GPT-4 access while solving problems significantly improves performance (48% improvement in grades for GPT Base and 127% for GPT Tutor). However, we additionally find that when access is subsequently taken away, students actually perform worse than those who never had access (17% reduction in grades for GPT Base)—i.e., unfettered access to GPT-4 can harm educational outcomes. These negative learning effects are largely mitigated by the safeguards in GPT Tutor. Without guardrails, students attempt to use GPT-4 as a “crutch” during practice problem sessions, and subsequently perform worse on their own. Thus, decision-makers must be cautious about design choices underlying generative AI deployments to preserve skill learning and long-term productivity.
The Political Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century. By Carolyn Laubender. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. 348p. 34.6
Nancy Luxon
📚 Perspectives on Politics
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Through a screen darkly: Toward effective transparency of telecommunications supply chains 34.5
Benjamin W. Cramer
📚 Telecommunications Policy
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Political competition and Chinese official data 34.5
Chia-Yu Tsai
📚 Public Choice
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Volatility-driven learning in human infants 34.5
Francesco Poli, Tommaso Ghilardi, Jana H. M. Bersee, Rogier B. Mars, Sabine Hunnius
📚 Science Advances
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Adapting to change is a fundamental feature of human learning, yet its developmental origins remain elusive. We developed an experimental and computational approach to track infants’ adaptive learning processes via pupil size, an indicator of tonic and phasic noradrenergic activity. We found that 8-month-old infants’ tonic pupil size mirrored trial-by-trial fluctuations in environmental volatility, while phasic pupil responses revealed that infants used this information to dynamically optimize their learning. This adaptive strategy resulted in successful task performance, as evidenced by anticipatory looking toward correct target locations. The ability to estimate volatility varied significantly across infants, and these individual differences were related to infant temperament, indicating early links between cognitive adaptation and emotional responsivity. These findings demonstrate that infants actively adapt to environmental change, and that early differences in this capacity may have profound implications for long-term cognitive and psychosocial development.
Partner, not comrade: blackness, cross-racial coalition, and power in France 34.4
Fania Noël
✹ Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Retraction notice to “Climate shocks and conflict: Evidence from colonial Nigeria” [Political Geography 50 (2015) 33–47] 34.3
Kostadis J. Papaioannou
📚 Political Geography
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The Nesting Strategies of E-Commerce Wanghong: Promotional Temporalities in Online Shopping Festivals on Chinese Platforms 34.0
Ruohan Li, Crystal Abidin
📚 Social Media + Society
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The wanghong economy in China adopts unique platform monetization strategies, including social tipping, virtual gifting, advertising, and more prominently, e-commerce. E-commerce wanghong are one type of influencer focusing on pushing sales through e-commerce services and play a pivotal role in integrating e-commerce and social media. Online shopping festivals have recently catalyzed the intersection of wanghong cultures and e-commerce. A typical example is the e-commerce giant Alibaba, which implemented multi-stage promotional activities during online shopping festivals to provide practitioners with expanded business opportunities. Notably, this flourishing integration of e-commerce and wanghong culture is carefully guided by the Chinese government’s unique political agenda and regulatory framework. To study this dynamic interplay between e-commerce wanghong, platforms, and national policies, we explore how e-commerce wanghong become a kind of “platformed wanghong.” Furthermore, we examine how e-commerce platforms change users’ experiences of time during online shopping festivals, which we refer to as “promotional temporalities.” Finally, we investigate the “nesting strategies” employed by e-commerce wanghong during these events, which are intertwined with the platform’s promotional temporalities and must navigate compliance within the national regulatory framework. Our findings shed light on the complex relationship between e-commerce wanghong, platform strategies, state regulation, and audience engagement in the context of platform economy.
Macroeconomic regime change and the size of supply chain disruption and energy supply shocks 33.4
Roberto A. De Santis, Tommaso Tornese
📚 European Economic Review
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Is disruption the second time around easier? The case of Iliad and the Italian telecommunications market 32.5
Shengxing Yang, Pierre Vialle, Jason Whalley
📚 Telecommunications Policy
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The Core of the Party System 32.2
Zuheir Desai, Tasos Kalandrakis
📚 The Journal of Politics
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How belief in conspiracy theories could harm sustainability 32.2
Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Jakub Ơrol, Marina Maglić
📚 Nature Human Behaviour
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Pseudo Lindahl Equilibrium as a Collective Choice Rule 32.0
Faruk Gul, Wolfgang Pesendorfer
📚 The Review of Economic Studies
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A collective choice problem specifies a finite set of alternatives from which a group of expected utility maximizers must choose. We associate a collective pseudo market with every collective choice problem and establish the existence and efficiency of pseudo Lindahl equilibrium (PLE) allocations. We also associate a cooperative bargaining problem with every collective choice problem and define a set-valued solution concept, the ω-weighted Nash bargaining set where ω is a vector of welfare weights. We provide axioms that characterize the ω-weighted Nash bargaining set. Our main result shows that ω-weighted Nash bargaining set payoffs are also the PLE payoffs of the corresponding collective pseudo market with the same utility functions and incomes ω. We define a pseudo core for collective pseudo markets and show that pseudo Lindahl equilibria are in the pseudo core. We characterize the set of PLE outcomes of discrete allocation problems and show that they contain the set of pseudo Walrasian equilibrium outcomes.
The logic of secret alliances 31.9
Peter Bils, Bradley C. Smith
📚 American Journal of Political Science
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Alliances are typically understood as agreements intended to deter aggression from enemy states. By signaling an ally's commitment to a protĂ©gĂ© state, a shared enemy may be deterred from attacking. In light of this signaling logic, secret alliances are puzzling. Because they are not observed, secret alliances by definition cannot achieve deterrence through signaling. So why do states enter into these secret agreements? We argue that alliances may also act as a signal of a state's intentions, potentially undermining deterrence. If a new alliance signals that the members' interests are unaligned with those of a shared enemy, the enemy may be provoked into war. As a consequence, states sometimes want to keep alliance agreements secret. To develop this argument, we analyze a formal model in which states may enter into secret or public alliance agreements. We find that the possibility of secret alliances has general effects on deterrence—possibly undermining the deterrent value of concurrent public alliances.
Haunted Temporalities: Ghosts and the geohauntologies of the Iran-Iraq war and the production of the nation-state through martyrdom 31.8
Hanieh Molana
📚 Political Geography
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Speaking back through repetitioning: black women’s resistance and empowerment in global university spaces 31.6
Naomi Alormele, Jessica S. Robles
✹ Ethnic and Racial Studies
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The evolution of infant-directed communication: Comparing vocal input across all great apes 31.4
Franziska Wegdell, Caroline Fryns, Johanna Schick, Lara Nellissen, Marion Laporte, Martin Surbeck, Maria A. van Noordwijk, Shelly Masi, Birgit Hellwig, Erik P. Willems, Klaus ZuberbĂŒhler, Carel P. van Schaik, Sabine Stoll, Simon W. Townsend
📚 Science Advances
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Human language is unique among communication systems since many elements are learned and transmitted across generations. Previous research suggests that this process is best predicted by infant-directed communication, i.e., a mode of communication directed by caregivers to children. Despite its importance for language, whether infant-directed communication is unique to humans or rooted more deeply in the primate lineage remains unclear. To assess this, we investigated directed and surrounding vocal communication in human infants and infants of wild nonhuman great apes. Our findings reveal that human infants receive dramatically more infant-directed communication than nonhuman great ape infants. These data suggest that the earliest hominins likely relied more on surrounding communication to become communicatively competent, while infant-directed vocal communication became considerably more prominent with human language.
Capturing the complexity of human strategic decision-making with machine learning 31.4
Jian-Qiao Zhu, Joshua C. Peterson, Benjamin Enke, Thomas L. Griffiths
📚 Nature Human Behaviour
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Media reparations: evaluating media reform projects 31.0
Irene Awino, David Cheruiyot
✹ Ethnic and Racial Studies
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A practical guide to interdisciplinary work in public health 30.3
Naja Hulvej Rod, Tibor V. Varga
📚 Nature Human Behaviour
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Worker-led AI governance: Hollywood writers' strikes and the worker power 29.8
Rafael Grohmann, Andre Campos Rocha, Guilherme Guilherme
📚 Information, Communication & Society
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Can platform literacy protect vulnerable young people against the risky affordances of social media platforms? 29.1
Sonia Livingstone, Reidar Schei Jessen, Mariya Stoilova, Line Indrevoll StÀnicke, Richard Graham, Elisabeth Staksrud, Tine Jensen
📚 Information, Communication & Society
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Asymptotic theory of the best-choice rerandomization using the Mahalanobis distance 29.0
Yuhao Wang, Xinran Li
📚 Journal of Econometrics
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Ten times faster is not 10 times better 28.1
Alondra Nelson
📚 Science
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As the Trump administration systematically defunds the American research ecosystem, while disingenuously promising a return to so-called “gold standard science,” hope can be drawn from the new bipartisan initiative from Senators Martin Heinrich (Democrat, New Mexico) and Michael Rounds (Republican, South Dakota). Their American Science Acceleration Project (ASAP) seeks to make science in the United States “ten times faster by 2030” through five pillars: data, computing, artificial intelligence (AI), collaboration, and process improvement. But simply accelerating will exacerbate historical weaknesses in our innovation system and reproduce the damaging Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things.” Faster is not necessarily better when it comes to innovation and discovery. Supercharging a research ecosystem that already struggles with accessibility and public trust risks more than it achieves.
Fool’s gold 27.6
David Michaels, Wendy Wagner
📚 Science
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Already rocked by decades of political interference, corporate influence, mismanagement, and partisan efforts to undermine its authority, the expert bureaucracy, the “lifeblood” of the US administrative state, is now gasping for air. On 23 May, President Trump issued an executive order (EO)—Restoring Gold Standard Science—promising to fix these issues. Instead, the EO is poised to make them far worse: It officially empowers political appointees to override conclusions and interpretations of government scientists, threaten their professional autonomy, and undermine the scientific capacity of research and regulatory agencies.
Making Decisions under Model Misspecification 27.4
Simone Cerreia–Vioglio, Lars Peter Hansen, Fabio Maccheroni, Massimo Marinacci
📚 The Review of Economic Studies
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We use decision theory to confront uncertainty that is sufficiently broad to incorporate “models as approximations.” We presume the existence of a featured collection of what we call “structured models” that have explicit substantive motivations. The decision maker confronts uncertainty through the lens of these models, but also views these models as simplifications, and hence, as misspecified. We extend the max-min analysis under model ambiguity to incorporate the uncertainty induced by acknowledging that the models used in decision-making are simplified approximations. Formally, we provide an axiomatic rationale for a decision criterion that incorporates model misspecification concerns. We then extend our analysis beyond the max-min case allowing for a more general criterion that encompasses a Bayesian formulation.
Remediated marketing: leveraging computer vision and rule-based classification models to detect e-cigarette warning labels across social media 27.3
Kellen Sharp, Marzieh Babaeianjelodar, Dhiraj Murthy, Rachel R. Ouellette, Juhan Lee, Amanda de la Noval, Neil Kamdar, Grace Kong
📚 Information, Communication & Society
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Transición energética y minería en el Sur Global 26.6
João Henrique Santana Stacciarini, Ricardo Junior de Assis Fernandes Gonçalves
đŸ”„ Preprint
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El agravamiento de las problemĂĄticas ambientales, sociales y econĂłmicas asociadas al uso de combustibles fĂłsiles intensifica la urgencia de una transiciĂłn hacia fuentes de energĂ­a renovables, impulsando la adopciĂłn de tecnologĂ­as como paneles solares, turbinas eĂłlicas y vehĂ­culos elĂ©ctricos. Aunque frecuentemente promovidas como soluciones sostenibles, estas tecnologĂ­as presentan caracterĂ­sticas intrĂ­nsecas - como menor densidad energĂ©tica, vida Ăștil reducida y limitaciones en los procesos de reciclaje - que incrementan la dependencia de minerales, muchos de ellos clasificados como “crĂ­ticos”. Este artĂ­culo busca contribuir al debate mediante el anĂĄlisis de los impactos del aumento significativo en la demanda de estos recursos. Con base en la definiciĂłn de minerales crĂ­ticos de la Agencia Internacional de EnergĂ­as Renovables - que incluye cobalto, nĂ­quel, cobre, litio y metales de tierras raras -, se realizĂł una amplia recopilaciĂłn, sistematizaciĂłn y anĂĄlisis de datos a escala global, identificando los principales paĂ­ses productores y los contextos socioambientales asociados a su extracciĂłn. Los resultados evidencian la reproducciĂłn de un patrĂłn histĂłrico: la mayor parte de estos minerales se extrae en paĂ­ses del Sur Global, especialmente en África, Asia y AmĂ©rica Latina, donde las normativas ambientales, sociales y econĂłmicas tienden a ser mĂĄs flexibles, favoreciendo a grandes corporaciones transnacionales. Se constatĂł, ademĂĄs, que la extracciĂłn de estos minerales suele estar asociada a impactos socioambientales graves, como contaminaciĂłn intensa, exposiciĂłn de trabajadores a metales tĂłxicos y financiamiento de milicias vinculadas a regĂ­menes autoritarios. Estas cuestiones, aĂșn poco discutidas en el discurso dominante sobre la temĂĄtica, requieren una mayor atenciĂłn por parte de la comunidad cientĂ­fica y de la sociedad en general, a fin de promover una transiciĂłn energĂ©tica verdaderamente justa a escala global.
paperboy --- A Collection of News Media Scrapers in R 25.4
Johannes B. Gruber
đŸ”„ Preprint
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The philosophy of the `R` package paperboy is that the package is a repository for webscraping scripts for news media sites, with advanced features for quick data retrieval --- even for content behind log-ins or anti-scraping measures. Many data scientists and researchers write their own code when they have to retrieve news media content from websites. At the end of research projects, this code is often collecting digital dust on researchers hard drives instead of being made public for others to employ. `paperboy` offers writers of webscraping scripts a clear path to publish their code and earn co-authorship on the package, while promising users to deliver news media data from many websites in a consistent format. With 177 covered as of today and a default scraper that often works well enough, `paperboy` can already facilitate a large range of research projects.
traktok --- Making TikTok Data Accesible for Research 25.2
Johannes B. Gruber
đŸ”„ Preprint
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The social media platform TikTok has surged in societal and political significance, underscoring the need for communication researchers to study its content and dynamics. `traktok` is an `R` package that combines an implementation of the TikTok Research API with access to TikTok content through web-scraping and the 'hidden' API, which was reverse engineered to grant users access to more content. While it is neither the first nor only tool to do so, the combination both ways to retrieve data from the platform with an easy-to-understand consistent syntax is built to encourage TikTok research.
Dark versus light personality types and moral choice 25.0
David L Dickinson
📚 European Economic Review
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Anchored inflation expectations and the slope of the phillips curve 24.8
Peter Lihn JĂžrgensen, Kevin J. Lansing
📚 European Economic Review
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Helping addicts: When can trying to do good be dysfunctional? 23.0
Federico Guerrero, Mina Mahmoudi, Mark Pingle, Rattaphon Wuthisatian
📚 Public Choice
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Earliest evidence of rice cultivation in Remote Oceania: Ritual use by the first islanders in the Marianas 3500 years ago 22.1
Mike T. Carson, Weiwei Wang, Xiujia Huan, Siqi Dong, Hsiao-chun Hung, Zhenhua Deng
📚 Science Advances
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Rice was a staple crop in the ancestral Austronesian regions of Taiwan and Island Southeast Asia, but it was unknown in any of the Pacific Islands at the time of European encounters, with the exception of the unique case of Guam and the Mariana Islands. Through multiple methodologies, including phytolith analysis, micro–computed tomography scanning, and thin-section petrography, this recent research confirms the presence of abundant rice husk and leaf phytoliths adhering to red-slipped pottery (“Marianas Red”) at the Ritidian Site Complex in Guam, dated by radiocarbon to 3500 to 3100 years ago. This study addresses the long-standing question of whether the first Pacific Islanders transported rice with them from the Philippines across 2300 kilometers of open sea, representing the longest known ocean voyage of the time. During this early period, rice was restricted to special ritual events in the Marianas. The early voyage apparently was planned with provisions of rice at 3500 years ago.
Data updated on June 27. Next update on July 04.